<p>With the acceleration of the digital economy, industrial intelligence has emerged as a pivotal force of digital–real integration, fundamentally reshaping corporate decision-making in cross-regional investment. Based on microlevel data of Chinese manufacturing firms from 2011 to 2023, this paper hinges upon New Economic Geography and spatial friction theory to investigate how industrial intelligence promotes corporate geographical expansion. We find that industrial intelligence exerts a positive and significant impact on cross-regional investment. To be specific, one standard deviation increase in industrial intelligence raises the scale of geographically dispersed subsidiaries by 63.3%. This effect operates through three mediating channels: reducing transportation costs, alleviating institutional barriers and enhancing technology diffusion, with the final channel dominating over traditional cost-driven motives as the primary driver. Moderation and heterogeneity analysis indicates that external environment, including intellectual property protection at institutional level as well as scientific talent distribution and digital infrastructure development at technological level, shows positive moderation effects. Furthermore, the impact of industrial intelligence exhibits substantial firm heterogeneity: Firms with stronger AI application capability, more optimized non-productive expenditure structures, and higher sustainable development ability are likely to achieve cross-regional investment elasticity. These findings extend beyond the unilateral cost-driven paradigm and establish a dual-pillar theoretical framework of institutional synergy and technology spillovers, revealing the renewed logic of firm boundary decisions in the digital era.</p>