A Nio battery swap station in Hefei, Anhui. Credit: Nio
- The delivery is a milestone in their plan to co-build 500 stations, with the footprint expanding beyond Anhui province.
- The first 50 stations from the partnership went into operation in December 2025.
Zhongan Energy, a partner of Nio Inc (NYSE: NIO), and the EV maker’s energy unit Nio Power have completed the delivery of 90 battery swap stations, formally moving their cooperation from a regional pilot to a nationwide roll-out.
The latest progress follows the first 50 stations from the partnership going into operation in December 2025, and represents a step up in both scale and depth of cooperation, Zhongan said in a statement on Wednesday.
The two sides signed an agreement in June this year to co-build 500 battery swap stations, extending their footprint to four key regions: the Yangtze River Delta, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and northwest China.
The delivery of the 90 stations is an important interim result toward that annual target, as well as a key step in replicating the partnership model outside Anhui province, Zhongan said.
Zhongan is the core implementation vehicle for Anhui province’s unified charging and battery swap service network. The company said it will speed up building an open and widely accessible energy service network.
Zhongan was established in January 2024 with the support of the Anhui provincial government, with investors including Anhui Province Energy Group, Nio and battery maker Gotion High-tech (SZSE: 002074).
Its initial goal was to build 1,000 stations integrating energy storage, charging and battery swap functions.
For Nio, such partnerships are based on a asset-light model, under which Nio handles the swap technology and daily operations while its partners own heavy assets including the stations.
The model helps the electric vehicle (EV) maker share the capital burden of infrastructure construction.
Nio has slowed its own pace of construction over the past two years to control capital expenditure. It added 679 battery swap stations in 2024 and 681 in 2025, according to data compiled by CnEVPost.
Still, the company has maintained its target of adding more than 1,000 battery swap stations in China in 2026. Meeting that goal increasingly depends on partners.
As of today, Nio has built 9,153 power facilities in China, including 3,997 battery swap stations and 5,156 charging stations.
The company will put its first fifth-generation battery swap station into service in Quanzhou, Fujian province, on August 7. It will also be its 4,000th battery swap station in China.
The fifth-generation stations use a rebuilt underlying architecture that accommodates a wider range of vehicle wheelbases. They will allow the compact brand Firefly to join the battery swap network for the first time.
The signing is the latest progress after the delivery of the first batch of 50 jointly built swap stations in December 2025.
