XPeng is set to lose another senior executive, with the head of its AI infrastructure department preparing to leave for OpenAI, the latest exit to hit the Chinese carmaker’s autonomy and robotics teams.
Lu Siyuan is handing over his responsibilities and will join OpenAI to work on embodied-AI robots, according to a report on Monday by the Chinese outlet Leiphone.
According to the same report, XPeng has yet to name a replacement. The company, founded and led by He Xiaopeng, has been facing several executive departures over the past twelve months.
Mi Liangchuan, who ran the robotics business, left last month, prompting founder and chief executive He Xiaopeng to take personal charge of the robotics center.
Li Liyun, the former head of autonomous driving, departed late last year — with Liu absorbing his duties — and has since joined the Chinese robotics start-up EngineAI as chief technology officer.
Lu Siyuan
Lu directly manages a team of about 200 people and reports to Liu Xianming, head of XPeng‘s General Intelligence Center.
Liu Xianming was in Munich last week, hosting media workshops hours before the launch event of the L03 coupe SUV.
Lu Siyuan has led the building of the company’s AI infrastructure, the layer beneath its self-driving software.
His working areas spanned from model-training frameworks, GPU-cluster management, chip compilers, data processing, model optimization, and the deployment of inference on the car through to mass production.
A Bet on Physical AI
The churn comes as XPeng recasts itself from a carmaker into what it calls a physical-AI company.
The group plans to start large-scale production and first deliveries of humanoid robots in the fourth quarter of 2026, and its AI infrastructure underpins not only those robots but its push to take assisted driving global.
XPeng has been testing its second-generation Vision-Language-Action system on public roads in Germany this month and plans to roll the technology out to overseas markets from 2027.
All of it — cars, robotaxis, robots and a flying car — runs on the same VLA foundation.
