Gasgoo Munich-On September 28 that the industry saw a major partnership announcement: Geely Holding Group and NIO Holding have officially entered a comprehensive strategic alliance on charging and battery swapping. The two sides reached a consensus to cooperate across technology, operations, and capital — planning joint investments in their respective business units, sharing technology and standards, and co-building a charging and swapping service network.
Image Source: NIO
As of September 23, 2026, NIO had deployed a total of 9,410 charging and swapping stations across China, including 4,109 battery swap stations and 5,301 charging stations. That puts the automaker at the top of the industry for infrastructure build-out.
On the highway front, NIO has installed 1,060 battery swap stations along expressways. This connects a network spanning "9 vertical and 11 horizontal corridors" across 16 major urban clusters, linking more than 550 cities nationwide.
Separately, NIO recently launched the world's first zero-carbon, off-grid photovoltaic-storage-swap station in Xingxingxia, Xinjiang. The site marks NIO's first verification of off-grid battery swapping. Powered entirely by solar energy, the system creates a zero-carbon closed loop of "generation, storage, and usage," supporting the station's full power needs independently of the external grid.
Geely Auto, for its part, is accelerating its own energy replenishment network. On September 23, the group unveiled "Geely Smart Charge," a next-generation AI-powered charging technology. The system boasts a peak charging power of 2.2 megawatts per connector and introduces three industry-first features: AI fast charging, AI smart charging, and AI automatic charging.
Under Geely's official roadmap, the automaker aims to establish more than 22,000 charging stations and over 100,000 charging connectors by the end of 2027. That includes over 15,000 smart charging stations, achieving "county-to-county" coverage across the country.
Cooperation between the two on energy replenishment actually began years ago. On November 29, 2023, Geely Holding and NIO Holding signed a strategic battery swap agreement, pledging comprehensive collaboration across battery standards, swapping technology, network construction and operations, R&D for swap-enabled models, and battery asset management.
This latest partnership marks a deeper level of open coordination between Geely and NIO in charging and swapping. Their deep mutual trust and resource integration in infrastructure could offer a replicable model for the industry, accelerating the shift of domestic charging and swapping networks from proprietary assets toward socialized public energy services.
