Alibaba Cloud and Leading Chinese Automakers will integrate Qwen AI at the 2026 Beijing Auto Show

On the opening day of the Beijing Auto Show, held on April 24, 2026, Alibaba Cloud and a coalition of leading automotive brands officially announced the large-scale integration of Qwen artificial intelligence into intelligent in-car systems. Manufacturers implementing this technology include companies such as BYD, Geely, Li Auto, Changan Automobile, Dongfeng Motor, BAIC, Great Wall Motor, SAIC Volkswagen, and SAIC IM Motors. This event marks a fundamental shift in the automotive industry: the concept of a smart cockpit is transforming from merely controlling vehicle's internal functions to seamlessly performing real-world daily tasks that extend far beyond the car's interior.

The technological foundation for such a large-scale deployment is Alibaba Cloud's specialized collaborative architecture, which combines edge and cloud computing capabilities. At the edge level, directly within the car, the multimodal Qwen — Omni model is deployed. It is responsible for perceiving and interpreting the physical environment, ensuring robust user privacy protection and high response speed even in conditions of weak or intermittent network connection.

Thanks to deep integration with the broader Alibaba Group ecosystem, vehicle owners will be able to perform a wide range of operations directly from the car's interior. In the near future, selected models from the listed manufacturers will allow users to book hotel rooms, purchase tickets for attractions, order food delivery, track mail shipments, make purchases, set up navigation, and conduct secure payments. To support this functionality, a reliable Alibaba Cloud computing infrastructure is used, which is optimized in conjunction with the Qwen architecture.

The current mass adoption builds upon a successful precedent set earlier this year by the FAW Hongqi brand, the premium division of China's FAW Group. The manufacturer was the first to integrate Qwen's agent capabilities into its intelligent Lingxi Cockpit system. This technological solution, which debuted in the Hongqi HS6 PHEV model, demonstrated the high efficiency of neural networks in real-world conditions. The implementation achieved accurate recognition of ambiguous voice commands from the driver and passengers, and also enabled complex planning of multi-step tasks.

Additionally, at the auto show, Alibaba representatives announced the adaptation of the multimodal Qwen — Omni model to run on the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor hardware platform. The goal of this partnership is to create an even more natural and seamless human-machine interaction within the cabin. Deployed on NVIDIA's in-vehicle computing platform, the in-cabin artificial intelligence transforms into a proactive agent. It is capable of providing intelligent recommendations and services based on a comprehensive understanding of the cabin environment, user's daily habits, and real-time road conditions.