Horizon Robotics

The draft amendment to the Road Traffic Safety Law introduces for the first time a dedicated chapter with special provisions for autonomous vehicles, clarifying that when traffic violations occur while autonomous driving functions are activated, the manufacturer or importer will be responsible for handling them, and requiring that autonomous driving functions must not be falsely or exaggeratedly advertised. The draft has 9 chapters and 170 articles, and also stipulates that autonomous vehicles must pass road traffic rule compliance testing and be legally registered before hitting the road, and implements a compulsory motor vehicle traffic accident liability insurance system. Cui Dongshu, head of the Passenger Car Market Information Joint Conference of the China Automobile Dealers Association, said this legal revision clarifies primary responsibility at the legal level and resolves the long-standing pain point of liability attribution. Market reaction was mixed. Hong Kong-listed new energy vehicle makers broadly fell, with XPeng down 9.19 percent, NIO down 3.45 percent, Li Auto down 3.60 percent, and Leapmotor down 5.71 percent. Among robotaxi concept stocks, Pony AI fell 5.62 percent and WeRide fell 3.95 percent. Meanwhile, the upstream intelligent driving industry chain was relatively resilient, with Desay SV down slightly by 0.45 percent, Momenta up 5.97 percent, and Horizon Robotics up slightly by 0.53 percent.

The Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong closed up 103.67 points, or 0.41%, at 25,310.85 today, bucking the trend of most Asian markets which fell on a tech sell-off. Xiaomi rose 2.0%, Tencent added 1.0%, Meituan edged up 0.9%, and Horizon Robotics surged 8.9%. Investors are closely watching the US Federal Reserve's monetary policy meeting this week, with CME Group's FedWatch Tool indicating a 62% probability that the Fed will hold rates at 3.50% to 3.75% at the July 28-29 meeting, and a 38% chance of a 0.25% rate hike. In addition, the US June personal consumption expenditures price index, due on Thursday, will be a key data point shaping rate expectations for the rest of the year. Meanwhile, Shein, the online fast-fashion giant, disclosed financial information ahead of its initial public offering, reporting a net loss of 99 million US dollars in the first quarter of 2026, compared with a net profit of 395 million US dollars in the same period a year earlier, as sales slowed sharply after the US ended a duty-free exemption for small parcels. This comes as the company prepares for its investor roadshow and official IPO subscription on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

Pathfinder's Shanghai Tongtu Semiconductor has officially signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Horizon Robotics to jointly optimize inference bandwidth and memory usage for large models on automotive-grade chips. Tongtu will leverage its full-stack data compression technology as the core, deeply integrating with Horizon Robotics' intelligent driving computing platform. This technology can compress video and other input data to one-fifth of its original size, further compress intermediate data by 50% on top of Google's TurboQuant, and achieve 30% parameter compression for large models with hundreds of billions or even trillions of parameters without retraining. The partnership is seen as a key move for China's on-device AI industry to break through the memory wall bottleneck. Tongtu's compression IP has been adopted in volume by leading supply chain players such as HiSilicon and Will Semiconductor, and its self-developed on-device dedicated compression chip has entered the tape-out and mass production stage. Since establishing its dual-core strategy in 2021, Pathfinder has successively acquired five chip companies—Beijing Core Energy, G2 Touch, Jiangsu Dingmao, Shenzhen Betterlife, and Shanghai Tongtu—building a chip product matrix covering the full chain of sensing, interaction, display, and compression, with Tongtu playing the role of a technological adhesive. In addition, Tongtu has signed a strategic cooperation memorandum with the global ecosystem platform GNS to integrate its compression technology into the GNS technology ecosystem, accelerating global commercialization.

Ant Group has led a 500 million yuan funding round in humanoid robotics company Zeroth, the start-up said on Thursday. The pre-Series A raise brings Zeroth's total funds raised to 1 billion yuan. Monolith, Geely Capital, 37 Interactive Entertainment, and Hua Capital also participated in the round. Zeroth, founded in late 2024, focuses on securing companies with experience in industries such as smartphone chips and currently uses chips from Horizon Robotics. Ant has invested in 12 humanoid robotics companies since the beginning of 2025, according to CNBC analysis of PitchBook data, and has released an AI and robotics-friendly version of its Alipay mobile payments service, an area Zeroth said it would like to cooperate in.