Black Sesame Maps Expansion Into Robotics With New Edge AI Strategy

Dan Jizhang, founder and CEO of Black Sesame Technologies, delivers a keynote speech

TMTPOST— Black Sesame Technologies is accelerating its ambitions in the intelligent chip space, unveiling a bold strategy to expand from autonomous driving into robotics.

Speaking at the 17th Xuanyuan Automotive Blue Book Forum in Guangzhou, founder and CEO Dan Jizhang delivered a keynote address titled “Building a New All-Scenario Intelligent Ecosystem with Core Chips,” outlining the company’s roadmap for the next phase of AI computing.

Held under the theme “Decision,” the three-day forum gathered leaders from China’s mobility and technology sectors to discuss ten key topics, including strategy, AI, global expansion, and embodied robotics.

During his address, Dan said that as computing moves deeper into the edge, the next frontier will be defined not by raw processing power but by bandwidth efficiency and the ability to tightly integrate chips, models, and algorithms. He noted that Black Sesame is focused on building physically dense, high-performance inference chips to meet the growing demands of advanced assisted driving and robotics.

Dan also laid out how chip development is entering a new phase. While Moore’s Law once drove progress through process scaling, and the “Law of Scale” emphasized hardware and algorithm synergy, the post–large model era is all about maximizing bandwidth and computational efficiency. He argued that future competitiveness will depend on how effectively companies can integrate computing hardware with increasingly complex AI workloads.

Black Sesame’s Huashan and Wudang chip families are at the core of its strategy. The Huashan A1000, launched in 2020, became China’s first domestic L2+ assisted driving chip. The Wudang C1200, released in 2023, introduced the industry’s first cross-domain computing platform that integrates cockpit and driving functions. The Huashan A2000, launched in late 2024, features the company’s new Jiushou NPU architecture—described by Dan as the largest neural processing unit core in the industry. It offers high computing power, energy efficiency, and bandwidth, designed to power next-generation AI models in smart vehicles and beyond.

Black Sesame claims that the Huashan A1000 powers the largest number of mass-produced vehicle models among domestic chips. The Wudang C1200 is expected to become the world’s first mass-produced chip integrating cockpit and driving platforms in 2025, while the A2000 is already being adopted by automakers for next-generation vehicles. To support evolving safety requirements, the company also launched an industry-first “safety-intelligent foundation,” designed to lower the cost barriers for assisted driving adoption while offering scalable computing and full lifecycle compatibility.

In a major strategic shift, Dan announced Black Sesame’s entry into the robotics sector. He compared the current state of robotics to China’s smart vehicle market in 2018 and said growth in the robotics sector will likely outpace that of cars, driven by technological maturity in chip design and rapid advancements in large language models, multimodal systems, and world modeling. The company aims to support robotic intelligence by leveraging the Huashan A2000 and Wudang C1200 series, which combine high-performance cores with flexible architecture to serve both current and future application needs.

The chips support a wide range of processing tasks—from perception and decision-making to control—and are accompanied by a comprehensive development toolchain that allows for rapid migration of mature autonomous driving algorithms into robotic applications. Dan emphasized that as robots evolve toward greater autonomy and self-optimization, the industry will require more integrated hardware-software solutions, robust compute, and real-time responsiveness—all areas where Black Sesame intends to lead.

Beyond its hardware offerings, the company is positioning itself as a systems integrator and platform provider, helping China build a new generation of intelligent infrastructure across vehicles, robots, and industrial systems. Dan concluded his speech by emphasizing that the ongoing wave of intelligence is transforming entire industries and that Black Sesame, through its sustained focus on performance, reliability, and ecosystem development, is committed to building an open and efficient framework for the future of intelligent technology.