Under the background of cultivating new quality productive forces, digital technology innovation has played an increasingly crucial role in the development of global value chain. This paper shows that digital technology innovation significantly promote the upgrading of export product quality, and it is robust after replacing variable measurement method, adding stricter fixed effects, eliminating extreme samples, using lag effect test and PSM-DID test, adopting instrumental variables and IV-2SLS. The channel analysis shows that digital technology innovation drives the upgrading of export product quality by promoting creative destruction, strengthening export stability, and promoting the diversity of digital product imports. Further, there are significant spillover effects of digital technology innovation in R&D networks and supply chain networks. The heterogeneity analysis shows that the role of digital technology innovation is more prominent in the samples of enterprises located in areas with strong intellectual property protection, enterprises with higher quality of digital technology innovation, enterprises participating in export competition with quality competition strategy, enterprises adopting cooperative R&D model, enterprises exporting to countries with weak digital economy, enterprises in industrial digitalization industry, and enterprises’ the export quality non-core products. The article provides research reference for promoting the construction of a strong trading nation and enhancing the security and stability of industrial and supply chains through digital technology innovation.