One in three Chinese cars runs on Horizon Robotics’ driving brain
Key points
Key takeaways from an In Good Company interview with Horizon Robotics founder and CEO Kai Yu (September 2026):
One in three smart cars. Horizon Robotics supplies the chips and software that form the driving brain of roughly one in three intelligent cars on Chinese roads, and passenger vehicles still account for 95–100% of its business.
Customers and rivals. Its customers span Chinese OEMs such as BYD, Chery, Changan and Great Wall plus global groups including Volkswagen, Toyota and Suzuki; Yu names Mobileye, Huawei, Black Sesame, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and NXP among competitors, and says China’s automotive-computing field has consolidated to Nvidia, Huawei and Horizon at the top.
A platform, not a carmaker. Yu positions Horizon as a “Microsoft and Intel for robots”: the company deliberately never builds cars, instead enabling every car brand, arguing the platform route multiplies impact the way Windows and Intel did for personal computing.
Mind-off road map. Targets set out in January 2025 call for fully hands-off driving by the end of 2028, eyes-off by the end of 2030 and “mind-off” (sleeping in the car) by the end of 2035; the Horizon SuperDrive stack on the Journey 6T chip already feels completely hands-free.
A brutal home market. China’s passenger-car market holds 60–70 brands and launched more than 580 new models in six months, driven by intense competition and consumer appetite for smart features such as automated parking, autonomous driving and richer infotainment.
High barriers, slow cycles. A new chip generation takes three to four years to design and qualify, plus about two years of platform production with Chinese OEMs or up to five with global ones — “a terrible business” that Yu argues is a great one because the entry barrier for newcomers is extremely high.
Fabless and focused. Horizon employs roughly 2,000 people, mostly engineers, designs the chips and end-to-end neural networks itself but outsources manufacturing; Yu credits a vision-driven culture where engineers organise their own time and the company never measures working hours.
China’s speed advantage. Yu attributes the roughly two-year Chinese model cycle to an unusually rich component and technology supply chain — a “wonderland” — and to demanding domestic customers who work hard without long summer holidays.
Read more: Norges Bank Investment Management · YouTube
