HoYoverse has officially announced a ₩22 trillion investment in AI, signaling its ambition to lead the next generation of the gaming industry through artificial intelligence.

Liu Wei, co-founder of HoYoverse (global brand name for miHoYo), held a private technical sharing and recruitment session in Beijing on May 15. Chinese media outlets, including Yicai, reported that Liu announced a plan to invest up to CN¥100 billion (approx. ₩22.2 trillion) in AI over the next three years, alongside a commitment to a full-stack in-house R&D strategy.

During the presentation, Liu emphasized the principle that 'the founder must be the technical lead,' explaining that decision-makers cannot keep pace with rapid paradigm shifts if they rely solely on reports. He signaled that he would remain deeply involved in the field. Under his leadership, the organizational structure is also being reshaped; he emphasized a flat organization of young, like-minded talent rather than relying on senior personnel who have already established their own domains.

The full-stack AI R&D initiative marks a major shift, as HoYoverse moves beyond simply fine-tuning external models. The company intends to develop everything in-house, from infrastructure to AI application architecture. The presentation also shared specific plans regarding R&D efficiency and technical implementation.

HoYoverse highlighted the principle of 'AI for AI, Model with Model.' A core task is building a self-tuning pipeline where AI autonomously analyzes learning bottlenecks and writes GPU kernel code. The company emphasized the importance of collaborative design across communication, computation, and data within a 10k-GPU cluster. Furthermore, it defined 'meaningful AI' as agents that not only read context—such as codebases or conversation logs—but also possess the authority to modify them directly.

AI utilization in games is also set to advance. To support natural language responses for in-game characters in environments with tens of millions of concurrent users, the company plans to implement: ▲a multi-module collaboration system where multiple small models handle specific roles to manage costs and latency; ▲inference logic embedding that trains directly on model weights rather than output token sequences; and ▲FP8 mixed-precision training to significantly reduce memory and computational requirements compared to traditional BF16. Additionally, HoYoverse plans to actively integrate AI NPCs into its upcoming life simulation game, Petit Planet (tentative title).

While HoYoverse has set a maximum investment ceiling of CN¥100 billion, the actual scale and pace of execution may vary. As a private company that does not disclose detailed financial information, the specifics of these investments are unlikely to be fully transparent. However, the massive scale of the investment and the full-stack development strategy demonstrate that Liu views AI not merely as a tool for R&D efficiency, but as the foundational technology for the next generation of gaming platforms.

Meanwhile, Liu stated that if the project ultimately fails, he would 'accept it' as 'just having set off a big firework.' This remark has been interpreted both as a luxury afforded by self-funded capital free from external shareholder pressure, and as a sign of his commitment to long-term investment, unswayed by the pressure for short-term results. Furthermore, the company’s early-stage angel investment in Chinese LLM startup MiniMax, which yielded significant returns, and its registration of its proprietary AI model, Glossa, serve as indicators that the company’s AI ventures have a strong potential for success.