Digitalization is an important lever for cultivating and developing new quality productive forces in enterprises. This paper uses the grounded theory methodology to refine the paths through which digitalization empowers new quality productive forces in enterprises and explores its formation mechanism. The results indicate that digitalization empowers new quality productive forces through three paths: quality improvement and efficiency enhancement, interactive cooperation, and innovative breakthroughs. Within these paths, digitalization plays roles in accelerating production management, linking resource relationships, and breaking through key technologies. Quality improvement and efficiency enhancement, along with interactive cooperation, promote high efficiency, high flexibility, and high collaboration, forming an important support for the “quality” in new quality productive forces in enterprises. Meanwhile, interactive cooperation and innovative breakthroughs give rise to new technologies, new business forms, and new models, constituting the core expression of “new”. The formation of new qualitative productive forces in enterprises is precisely the dynamic evolutionary process in which the three aforementioned paths connect with and promote each other, “nurturing ‘new’ with ‘quality’ and enhancing ‘quality’ with ‘new’”. A mechanism model for digitalization empowering new quality productive forces in enterprises is constructed. The conclusions of this paper are expected to provide theoretical guidance and practical inspiration for cultivating new quality productive forces in enterprises in the era of the digital economy.