Developing new quality productive forces is an inherent requirement and a crucial lever for promoting high-quality development. Similarly, the high-quality development of an open economy cannot be achieved without the eff ective empowerment of new quality productive forces. In terms of the mechanism of empowerment, new quality productive forces replace factordriven growth with innovation-driven growth, reshaping the drivers of open economy development. By driving industrial innovation through technological innovation, they facilitate the optimization and upgrading of industries within the open economy. Furthermore, by reshaping regional opening-up layouts and facilitating the effi cient fl ow of domestic factors, they systematically drive the transformation of the domestic landscape of the open economy from unbalanced development toward coordinated optimization. However, the current process of empowerment still faces practical obstacles, including insufficient capacity for original innovation in science and technology, the immaturity of strategic emerging industries, and regional imbalances in the development of new quality productive forces. To address these challenges,it is imperative to strengthen the capacity for original innovation in science and technology to solidify internal drivers, accelerate the cultivation of strategic emerging industry clusters to promote industrial upgrading, and foster new quality productive forces tailored to local conditions to optimize spatial layout, thereby eff ectively empowering the high-quality development of an open economy.