The joint venture model in China's automotive industry is undergoing a profound generational shift—no longer defined by Chinese and foreign partners, no longer confined to brands and products, but anchored by core technologies as the new focal point.
Two major automakers in East China have announced a collaboration once again after a three-year interval.
On September 28, 2026, NIO Holdings Co., Ltd. and Geely Holding Group simultaneously released announcements: the two parties have reached a comprehensive strategic partnership in the battery swap and charging fields across technology, operations, and capital dimensions.
This is not a simple expansion of a battery swap alliance, nor a memorandum of sharing technologies and standards. What NIO and Geely are doing is mutual shareholding and cross-investment, with both sides bringing their core energy replenishment assets to the table for a joint venture.
According to the formal agreement, Geely Holding Group will subscribe to the newly issued equity of NIO Energy Investment (Hubei) Co., Ltd. with its 100% equity in YiYi Interconnected Technology (Chongqing) Co., Ltd., plus CNY 640 million in cash.
Upon completion of the transaction, Geely will hold a 30% stake in NIO Energy, while NIO will retain a 63.6% controlling interest, with the remaining 6.4% held by Wuhan Guangchuang Fund; meanwhile, NIO will invest cash into Geely Haohan Energy, acquiring a 10% equity stake.
As early as 2023, NIO's battery swap business had already brought Changan and Geely "on board," and YiYi Interconnected Technology was a product of that initiative.
Today's architecture, however, is far beyond what it was back then, aiming at over 10,000 battery swap stations, 100,000 charging guns, and 10 billion kWh of swapped electricity.
However, what is even more profound is the timing of 2026 and the era's background where the anchor of joint ventures has undergone a turning point.
01Building the Largest Energy Replenishment Business in the Auto Industry?
Beyond the financial amount, this transaction also requires attention to the integration of businesses.
YiYi Interconnected's battery swap business for commercial vehicles will be integrated into NIO Energy. NIO Energy will continue to enhance the operation of the commercial vehicle battery swap network, empowering YiYi Interconnected's commercial vehicle business.
Conversely, after NIO subscribes to the newly issued equity of Zhejiang Haohan Energy Technology Co., Ltd., the charging resources of both parties will be fully interconnected, jointly improving the coverage and operational efficiency of the charging network.
Essentially, this is a case of leveraging respective strengths and meeting mutual needs: in the battery swap sector, NIO is the major shareholder; in the charging sector, Geely holds the larger share.
Under this logic of division of labor, Gasgoo sees a few implicit words: the largest energy replenishment business in the auto industry.
What is the current level of energy replenishment business for NIO and Geely?
As of September 26, 2026, NIO has cumulatively built 9,431 charging and battery swap stations nationwide, including 4,125 battery swap stations, 5,306 charging stations, and 30,594 charging piles, providing over 125 million battery swap services in total. William Li, Chairman of NIO, revealed at Power UP 2026 NIO Power Day that the 4,125 battery swap stations, based on a battery reserve of about 2,000 kWh per station, can form an 8 GWh energy storage network.
On the Geely side, as of November 2025, Haohan Energy has cumulatively launched 2,028 self-built charging stations, covering 213 cities nationwide, including 1,190 ultra-fast charging stations and 5,349 ultra-fast charging piles. Its inventory of automaker-built 800V ultra-fast charging piles leads the industry.
What about the plans after joining forces?
By the end of 2027, Geely plans to build over 22,000 charging stations and over 100,000 charging guns, including over 15,000 Geely Smart Charging stations and over 50,000 smart charging guns, taking the lead in achieving comprehensive coverage of county-level cities nationwide.
NIO Energy plans to cumulatively build 10,000 battery swap stations by 2030, and it is estimated that the annual electricity demand of the NIO battery swap network will exceed 10 billion kWh by then.
On the charging side, after NIO acquires a 10% stake in Haohan Energy, the charging resources of both parties will be fully interconnected. Considering that NIO has integrated over 1.73 million third-party charging piles, coupled with the more than 2,000 self-built stations by Haohan Energy, the network effects brought by interconnection will manifest in a very short time.
By April 2026, even for a NEV powerhouse like Tesla, its energy replenishment scale in mainland China stood at: over 2,500 Supercharger stations, over 12,000 Superchargers, over 650 Destination Charging stations, and over 2,500 Destination Chargers.
In other words, a year later, the number of Geely's charging stations will reach 8.8 times that of Tesla's current scale. Coupled with battery swap replenishment, the coverage scope is imaginable.
02Why Battery Swap, Not Chips?
Before the official announcement, a version circulated in the industry: NIO and Geely would reach a cooperation in the field of intelligent driving chips, and Geely might adopt chips from NIO's Shenji Technology. In March 2026, media reports revealed that after the successful tape-out of the M97 chip developed jointly by NIO Shenji and Axera Semiconductor, they were actively contacting automakers such as Leapmotor and Geely.
But what was finally officially announced was battery swap, not chips.
The reason is not complicated. Geely's route for intelligent driving chips is already very clear. In early 2025, Geely released the "Qianli Haohan" intelligent driving system, covering five levels from H1 to H9. The high-end solutions explicitly adopt NVIDIA chips, and Geely has already invested substantial R&D resources in this route.
Switching chip platforms at this stage would mean overturning existing technical architectures and R&D investments, and re-adapting to entirely new chip solutions and toolchains, which would incur extremely high costs and a very long cycle.
In contrast, the logic of cooperation in the battery swap field is extremely smooth. Synergy in the energy replenishment field is the direction where both parties can truly see practical benefits in the short term.
Geely's newly released "Geely Smart Charge" technology, relying on the Xingrui PowerMind Energy Foundation Model jointly developed with StepFun, has achieved a peak charging power of 2.2 MW per gun.
NIO's battery swap system, on the other hand, is currently the only battery swap network in the Chinese market that has achieved scaled operations. Charging and battery swapping, two technical routes, achieve underlying synergy through the joint venture. This imaginative space is far more realistic than chip cooperation.
There is a sentence in the official press release worth reading word by word: "Both parties will jointly build unified consumer-facing battery swap technologies and standards. Geely Holding Group will develop consumer-facing battery swap vehicle models, and NIO Energy will provide services for Geely Holding Group's consumer-facing battery swap models."
This means that Geely's subsequent launch of battery swap models is a foregone conclusion; it is only a matter of time and brand selection. There is basically no suspense that the battery swap standards will refer to NIO's existing mature system.
As a source close to the transaction put it, the essence of this matter is very simple: "NIO's standards, which are already very strong, are already there. Next, Geely just needs to consider which brand and which models to use to produce battery swap vehicles."
YiYi Interconnected is an easily overlooked but highly critical piece in this transaction. This company, under Geely, provides battery swap services for the commercial vehicle market. It has deployed and operated over 460 battery swap stations in more than 40 cities nationwide, including Guangzhou. Its cumulative battery swap mileage exceeds 2.5 billion kilometers, with over 50,000 battery swap vehicles sold cumulatively and over 30,000 vehicles connected to the network.
After injecting this asset into NIO Energy, NIO's battery swap business will officially expand from its original consumer-centric model to a full-scenario model covering both commercial and consumer markets simultaneously.
03Generational Upgrade of the Joint Venture Model
If this cooperation is viewed merely as a commercial transaction between two automakers, its significance would be underestimated.
The joint venture model in China's automotive industry is undergoing a profound generational shift—no longer defined by Chinese and foreign partners, no longer confined to brands and products, but anchored by core technologies as the new focal point.
Looking back at the first stage, starting in the 1980s, the anchor of joint ventures was foreign brands and products.
SAIC Volkswagen, FAW-Volkswagen, GAC Honda, Dongfeng Nissan—the core value of these joint ventures was to bring mature foreign vehicle models to the Chinese market for production and sales. The foreign party provided brands and products, while the Chinese party provided the market and production capacity; technology itself was not within the scope of the joint venture.
During that stage, the role played by China's automotive industry in joint ventures was "trading market for products," without even touching the edges of technology.
The second stage, starting around the late 2010s, saw the anchor of joint ventures begin to shift towards technology. The most iconic case is CARIZON, the joint venture established in 2023 between CARIAD under the Volkswagen Group and Horizon Robotics.
CARIAD holds a 60% stake, and Horizon Robotics holds a 40% stake. CARIZON has a registered capital of CNY 6.757 billion, focusing on the R&D of advanced autonomous driving application software and systems for the Chinese market, with the Volkswagen Group as its primary customer in the short term.
The anchor of this transaction is very clear—intelligence, or more specifically, intelligent driving chips and algorithms. Volkswagen needs local intelligent capabilities in China, and Horizon Robotics needs stable mass production orders; both get what they need.
This cooperation between NIO and Geely pushes the joint venture model into the third stage. The anchor is no longer just a single technical module, but an entire set of infrastructure—the battery swap and charging network. It is not a specific chip, a specific set of software, or a specific platform, but an energy replenishment system covering the entire country and open to all brands.
The significance of this change lies in the fact that energy replenishment networks inherently possess the attributes of public infrastructure. Unlike intelligent driving chips that can be encapsulated within a single vehicle model, or platform architectures that can be internally absorbed, they are fundamentally different.
Battery swap stations are built there, and any car can come to swap; charging piles are set up there, and any car can come to charge. This shared attribute of infrastructure means that the value of the joint venture is reflected not only in the two shareholders but also at the industry level.
This cooperation between NIO and Geely is the first time an energy replenishment network is operated as the core asset of a joint venture. This means that the competitive landscape of China's automotive industry is shifting from "whose products are better" to "whose infrastructure is stronger."
And the competition for infrastructure will inevitably lead to alliance formation—the return on investment for a single automaker building its own energy replenishment network is becoming increasingly unprofitable, and open sharing is the only sustainable path.
There is an expression in the official press release worth noting: "This cooperation is a practical action by the two enterprises to actively respond to the '15th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Intelligent Connected NEV Industry', practice 'anti-involution', and improve the efficiency of industrial resource allocation."
Writing "anti-involution" into a joint venture press release was almost unimaginable in the past. The signal it conveys is very clear: regulators hope to see resource integration and efficiency improvement, rather than redundant construction and vicious competition. As a heavy-asset infrastructure, the energy replenishment network especially needs this open and collaborative mindset.
From another perspective, the post-investment valuation of NIO Energy is approximately CNY 16 billion, while Geely acquires a 30% stake with 100% equity of YiYi Interconnected plus CNY 640 million in cash.
This valuation level, applied to an energy company with 4,125 battery swap stations, 300,000 charging piles, and experience in over 125 million battery swap services, obviously still has significant room for growth. Geely has obtained a ticket to China's most mature battery swap network at a relatively reasonable price, while NIO has gained the urgently needed capital injection and access to the commercial battery swap market. Both get what they need and achieve mutual success.
In 2018, NIO put its first battery swap station into operation in Shenzhen. At that time, almost no one believed the battery swap model could survive.
Eight years later, the 4,125 battery swap stations nationwide have not only survived but have also become the hardest bargaining chip in the new wave of joint ventures in China's automotive industry.
William Li once said a repeatedly quoted sentence: "Battery swapping is not just NIO's business." Looking at it now, the weight of this sentence is far heavier than when it was first spoken.
When battery swap stations become the anchor of joint ventures, and when infrastructure replaces brands as the hardest bargaining chip, the joint venture story of China's automotive industry has truly turned the page to be written by itself.
Managing Editor: Shi Jie Editor: Wang Yue