From gaming to becoming the richest man, it all started with his counterattack against XunTeng.

Chapter 98 The Man Who Keeps Capital Up at Night

Yang Yi was fast asleep.

Exhausted after the live stream ended, he took Shen Xiao straight home. He took off his shoes, showered, and then collapsed onto the bed with her in his arms. His phone vibrated twice on the bedside table, but he didn't answer and drifted off to sleep.

He slept soundly, but many people won't be able to sleep tonight.

They were all bigwigs from various industries, and the conference rooms of major companies were brightly lit.

Shanghai, the future headquarters.

Li Bin went straight to the airport after leaving the press conference, and the plane landed at almost 11 o'clock.

He walked out of the arrival hall with a much faster pace than usual, his suit jacket draped over his arm, his tie half-loose, followed by three equally tense-looking entourage members.

The car was already waiting at the door. He bent down and got in, wearily saying, "Back to the company," before leaning back in the seat and closing his eyes.

The conference room lights were all on, and a wave of smoke rushed out when the door was opened.

The long table was filled with people, some still in suits, others in pajamas with a jacket over them, clearly dragged from home.

Everyone looked rather grim; some had overflowing ashtrays, while others were engrossed in their phones, the screens dimly lit.

Their faces were all tired.

Li Bin sat down in the main seat, draped his suit jacket over the back of the chair, glanced around at everyone present, and spoke in a slightly hoarse voice: "You've all seen the swarm's battery data."

No one responded.

The smoke rose slowly under the lights, then dispersed and gathered again by the cold air from the air conditioner.

Li Bin paused for a moment, then pulled up a photo of the battery parameters on his phone and placed it on the table, pushing the screen upwards: "Single cell energy density 440, volumetric energy density 1100. Charges to 80% in 15 minutes, 2000 cycles, works normally from -30°C to 60°C. Does not catch fire when punctured by a needle."

An investor sitting across from me picked up his phone, scrolled through it, and then put it down again.

Another executive next to him asked in a low voice, "Is the battery swapping business still viable?"

Li Bin did not answer.

The silence of everyone is the answer.

The air in the conference room was so heavy it felt like it was about to condense.

The underlying logic of the battery swapping model is to use range anxiety to gain market share. Swarm batteries have directly eliminated range anxiety, so how can battery swapping still be sold?

Most of the people standing in this conference room are investors who have accompanied the company step by step into the future; some of them invested in A...

Some companies entered the round of funding, with the latest being the D round.

Dozens of institutions were tied to this ship, and just last month they were discussing how to split the profits after the IPO. Overnight, the sky fell.

They also want to save the future.

However, it was of little use; they were already overwhelmed with their own problems and couldn't offer any help.

The domestic business environment is complex and complicated. The future investor even watched the press conference with him beforehand. If there was a way, he would have told him already.

So who will be the investors in the future?

Pony Ma, Lei Jun, Liu Qiangdong, CITIC —

In particular, XunTeng led four rounds of investment, becoming the largest Internet shareholder, with its shareholding second only to Li Bin.

And then there's Lei Zi, who was laughing and joking in Yang Yi's live stream before, but when he came out, his phone was ringing off the hook.

The laughter stopped instantly.

Shunwei Capital has invested in quite a few new energy vehicle companies.

Shunwei Capital's Shenzhen Stock Exchange office.

When Lei Zi hung up the phone, he glanced at the time: 1:12 AM.

He placed his phone on the table, screen down, and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his temples.

Tonight he rejected "guidance requests" from six new energy vehicle companies; the phone kept ringing, all saying the same thing.

"Mr. Lei, what do you think we should do about this?"

What could he do? When it comes to batteries, whoever makes them decides what to do.

When he initially invested in new energy, he focused on two routes: battery swapping and fast charging. Now, fast charging has been completely outmaneuvered by swarm chargers in just fifteen minutes, and battery swapping has been effectively rendered obsolete. This is beyond his control.

All those car and electric vehicle companies can do is adapt to the trends of the times.

But damn, new energy is a hot trend supported by the government. In recent years, any capital with a certain scale in China has been pouring into it. Xun Teng, Alibaba, Shunwei, CITIC, Hillhouse Capital, Sequoia Capital, dozens of institutions, and hundreds of billions of yuan have tied themselves to dozens of new car companies.

Beehive's use of batteries has leveraged new energy vehicle companies, and at the same time, it has also leveraged a large portion of domestic capital.

It really turned the domestic business world upside down.

The only good news is that Lei Zi learned from Yang Yi that the cost of semi-solid batteries is not low, and automakers still have room to maneuver.

He also has a headache about the future. His core competitiveness has been destroyed. Even if he cuts his losses and abandons battery swapping, he will be no different from a second-rate car company.

More than 7 million yuan has gone down the drain, even though the company was scheduled to go public in just a few months.

After thinking about XunTeng, Lei Zi felt much better; they had invested 35 billion.

In another conference room, several reports were spread out in front of Xiao Ma.

He turned two pages, took off his glasses, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

The top document contains battery data from Swarm Power, and below it is a long list of new energy vehicle company holdings compiled by XunTeng Investment Department, followed by shareholding ratios and valuations.

He looked at it for a while, closed the report, a hint of heartache flashing in his eyes, and picked up the tea on the table to take a sip.

The assistant stood by for a while, and seeing that the boss didn't speak, asked softly, "Mr. Ma, are we having a meeting tomorrow?"

Brother Ma put down his teacup: "No rush. Let them make a mess of things and see what Yang Yi plans to do next."

The lights in the CATL headquarters conference room were also on.

When the data for the cellular battery came out, we had already started disassembling it. 440Wh/kg, 1100Wh/L, and it doesn't catch fire when punctured by a needle.

Every single indicator is more than one level higher than CATL's next-generation products currently under development.

The conference room was filled with people from all departments involved in battery research and development, materials, production, and marketing. The projection screen displayed the complete parameters of the swarm semi-solid-state battery, while next to it were comparative data of CATL's most favored next-generation solution. Between the two columns of numbers was a gap that could not be filled.

An engineer stared at the charts on the screen for a long time, then suddenly asked, "Can we catch up with this data within three years?"

There was a few seconds of silence, and no one answered.

The head of R&D didn't speak, his gaze still fixed on the column of numbers.

CATL has been making batteries for many years and has seen competitors catch up and technology iterations, but I have never seen a company like CATL's Swarm, whose first-generation product directly jumps to a position that others haven't even reached in the next generation.

Pure technical superiority.

The planned next-generation battery has become a joke, and they don't even know which direction to take next.

The meeting lasted for nearly two hours, and when it adjourned, not a single consensus was reached. The only response was, "Go back and come up with your own solutions."

BYD conducted the same teardown, and the data they obtained was equally disheartening. However, their response was significantly faster than CATL's.

Inside the conference room of BYD's headquarters building, Mr. Wang finished reading the dismantling report, then read it again, took off his reading glasses, wiped them a couple of times, put them back on, and read it one last time.

As an engineer by training, he has a habit of digging deep into the root of things. While others look at the parameters of cellular batteries, he looks at the cost line, supply chain, and mass production difficulties.

After looking at it, he said, "The only downside to this thing right now is that it's expensive."

The office fell silent for a moment.

He turned to the cost estimate page in the report and pointed to the line of numbers: "For the same range, the cost of swarm batteries is 20% to 30% higher than ours. Not all cars can afford this extra cost."

After saying that, the tension that had been building up inside him eased considerably.

The direction of our discussion then changed; we couldn't catch up, but we could take a detour.

BYD's strategy that night was very clear: shift its R&D focus from "pursuing energy density" to "controlling costs," develop high-performance, low-end battery solutions, pursue low-priced vehicles, and weather this period with austerity measures.

At the same time, the company began to assess how much battery procurement cost it could afford without affecting the overall vehicle profit, leaving a backup plan for possible future cooperation with Swarm.

This is BYD's advantage: vertical integration, self-production and self-use of batteries, and a risk resistance capability far exceeding that of CATL.

SMIC also held a meeting.

Yang Yi's statement at the press conference, "From architecture to instruction set to compiler, everything is based on swarm architecture," highlights this point.

SMIC's senior executives read this sentence several times.

It does not rely on any foreign licenses and does not require ARM or 86 licenses, which means that it can switch to domestic foundries at any time.

This is a rare, high-quality client – ​​one in ten years!

The atmosphere in the meeting room was noticeably more relaxed, and some people had already begun discussing how to allocate production capacity and when to send a team to the hive to coordinate.

They seem to have gotten a little carried away and forgotten that their current 12nm technology is still in the lab and cannot be mass-produced.

Meanwhile, downstream AIC manufacturers were also holding meetings overnight.

ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, Colorful, and Maxsun, several major graphics card OEMs and brand owners, each held an impromptu meeting.

The news spread quickly: Hive's reference graphics cards will eventually be licensed, and whoever gets AIC qualification first will be among the first to benefit.

ASUS responded the fastest.

The head of the ROG product line made a decision at the meeting to dedicate a production line to the swarm chip, and to simultaneously evaluate the heat dissipation solution and power supply design of the swarm chip.

Gigabyte and MSI acted quickly, sending people to keep watch outside the Hive building overnight.

Colorful was a little slower, but they still held a meeting all night and finally concluded that they had to secure the first batch, even if the conditions were a bit harsh.

Someone at the meeting asked a question: "Although the Swarm license is authorized, will Nvidia restrict our supply?" After this question was raised, the meeting room fell silent for a while.

Then someone added, "If Nvidia dares to cut off supplies, I'll just switch to AMD and Swarm."

No one refuted this statement.

Everyone knows that now is not the time to choose sides, but rather a question of who gets on the bus first.

Several manufacturers have already figured out the costs and benefits: if they don't get on board with Hive, and others do, they'll be left behind.

Another smaller brand, Mingxuan, had its manager tell his staff at the end of the meeting, "Fly directly to Shenzhen tomorrow morning and wait downstairs at Beehive. This might be a further opportunity for us."

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