Nio’s associate vice-president Chengchen Hu announced this week he is leaving the Chinese electric vehicle maker after nearly four years with the company, during which he served as chief expert of technology planning.
In a Weibo post published on Sunday, Hu thanked colleagues for a farewell video and ceremony, describing his departure as a graduation. “1,351 days—grateful for this unique journey. I’ll take some time off and see you again someday,” he wrote.
Hu, who described himself as the “founding head of Nio’s technology planning department,” joined the company in 2021.
According to his LinkedIn profile, his responsibilities included defining Nio’s long-term technology roadmap, leading strategic R&D projects, and overseeing the company’s artificial intelligence agenda, including the transition to large language models (LLMs) across its tech stack.
He also chaired the company’s AI and AGI committee, where he was “directing and enforcing company-wide AI R&D and LLM transition, across the entire tech stack including infrastructure, data, LLM model, toolchain, agents, etc.”
Several Chinese media outlets had attributed to Hu a key role in leading the development of Nio’s first in-house autonomous driving chip, the Shenji NX9031 — a 5nm automotive-grade processor unveiled last year — crediting him with shortening the company’s smart driving iteration cycle from one year to one quarter.
However, Nio denied that Hu was involved in chip development. In a post on Weibo on Wednesday, Ma Lin, assistant vice-president for branding and communications at the EV maker, dismissed reports linking Hu to the chip team and clarified his role.
“A thumbs-up to the chip team — they’ve provided strong hardware support for our world model, NWM,” Ma wrote. “Our chip team is highly capable, stable, and no core members have left.”
“Yesterday, there was quite a bit of information linking the company’s former head of technology planning, Hu Chengchen, to the chip team. This is a bit of a misunderstanding, and I’d like to take this opportunity to clarify,” he continued.
“During his time at the company, Hu Chengchen was mainly responsible for coordinating the R&D departments in studying and formulating the company’s long-term technology roadmap and implementation plans. He was not involved in chip R&D or related work.”
“The company thanks Mr. Hu Chengchen for his contributions and wishes him all the best in his future endeavors,” Ma concluded.
Nio launched its chip in late 2023 with the flagship sedan ET9 being the first model to integrate it.
Last month, Chinese publication LatePost reported that Nio is seeking strategic investors for its chip-related operations, with plans to divest a minority stake while retaining control over the business.
Approached by LatePost, the company denied the report, stating that it is “speculative information.”
At the same time, the EV maker founded a separate legal entity named Anhui Shenji Technology Co., Ltd. for its chip R&D project, which was a business unit under Nio until now.
According to data shared by the platform Tianyancha, the business scope of the new subsidiary includes chip design and sales and has a registered capital of 10 million yuan ($1.4 million).
The departure comes amid several other executive departures at the company.
In April, Alan Ai stepped down as president of Nio’s budget sub-brand Onvo and senior vice-president of Nio after multiple missed sales targets.
He was replaced by Shen Fei, former head of Nio’s energy division, Nio Power, who now reports directly to Nio co-founder and president Lihong Qin.
The energy unit, which covers the battery swapping and charging technology, has been led since then by Nio’s CFO Stanley Qu.
Later that month, Fan Haoyang, head of Nio’s autonomous driving algorithms, also exited the company. In May, the general managers of Nio’s Tianjin and Dalian regional offices, Gu Yue and Gong Dequan, were also reported to have left their posts.
Also, EV has learned that Chengchen Hu is not the only AVP leaving the company over the last few months.
Nio’s vehicle registrations in Norway fell to just 22 units in June, marking the weakest monthly performance since January 2023.
In Sweden, sales also hit a new low since early 2023 as the company registered only one EL7 SUV throughout the last month of the second quarter.
Over the next 18 months, the company will expand to over a dozen new markets with its core brand but also with Firefly, a direct competitor to BMW’s Mini and Smart brands.
