Gasgoo Munich- Horizon Robotics founder and CEO Yu Kai spoke at the 2026 China Auto Chongqing Summit on June 13. He said the smart car industry has shifted from a "dreaming phase" to a "delivery phase" and a "time for results." Capital markets are no longer swayed by corporate visions of the future, Yu Kai noted. Instead, they are fixated on hard metrics like revenue growth, gross margins, competitive edge, and costs. Companies should stop obsessing over technical jargon, he urged, and focus on the value they actually create.
Image source: China Auto Chongqing Summit
Reflecting on Horizon's trajectory, Yu Kai said the company followed a "countryside-to-city" approach. It started with lower-compute chips like the Journey 2 and Journey 3 before pushing into the high-performance market. To address the weak software ecosystem often plaguing high-compute chips, Horizon rolled out its mass-produced end-to-end driving system, HSD, to build a domestic chip ecosystem. The company has since expanded from driving chips to driving software, cockpit chips, and cockpit operating systems, aiming to power intelligent computing across all vehicle categories in China.
On the product front, Horizon introduced "Starray," a chip that integrates cockpit and driving functions. By merging the two domain controllers, it saves roughly 20GB of memory and cuts per-vehicle costs by 2,000 to 4,000 yuan. Built on a 5nm automotive-grade process, the flagship Starray 6P offers 650 TOPS of BPU computing power and is slated for mass production in the third quarter of 2026.
Regarding industry synergy, Yu Kai views the current trend of in-house R&D by automakers as a temporary phase. As specialized suppliers mature, he predicts 80% of the market will eventually return to a specialized division of labor. Horizon plans to work with automakers and ecosystem partners to create value and navigate the sector's challenges.
