BMW and Alibaba to bring Qwen-based cockpit AI to new iX3
At its 2026 China Innovation Day held on October 15, BMW announced that the new-generation BMW iX3 will feature cabin AI capabilities developed specifically for the Chinese market. The capability was jointly developed by BMW and Alibaba, powered by Alibaba's Qwen large language model, with Banma handling cabin applications and vehicle-side integration, all embedded into the BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant.
Alibaba Group Vice President and CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, Fei-Fei Li, said Alibaba will start from user scenarios to make the new-generation BMW smart cockpit smarter and more natural.
Alibaba has positioned itself as a full-stack AI technology partner for automakers. According to IDC, Alibaba Cloud held a 42% share of China's automotive public cloud IaaS market in the second half of 2025, remaining in first place for five consecutive years. Nearly 30 carmakers and autonomous driving solution providers use Alibaba Cloud for intelligent driving R&D, with more than 100,000 PPUs in actual use. Alibaba's AI has also entered areas including smart cockpits, model training, software development and manufacturing.
