As a key equipment of manufacturing, the intelligence of CNC machine tools affects the development and progress of intelligent manufacturing. At the same time, the rapid development of various technologies in recent years, such as cloud computing and edge computing, has brought new methods to improve the intelligence of CNC machine tools. This article proposes a new architecture of intelligent machine tools based on edge-cloud collaboration (IMT-ECC). The hierarchical structure of IMT-ECC is introduced and consists of three layers, data acquisition, network communication and edge-cloud collaboration. Combining the real-time characteristic of edge computing and complex problem processing ability of cloud computing, the edge-cloud collaboration is designed to improve the intelligence of machine tools through data collaboration, information collaboration and knowledge collaboration. Finally, the feasibility of the new intelligent machine tool architecture based on edge-cloud collaboration is verified by experiments with gantry heavy-duty CNC machine tools.