On 19 May, Lei Jun, founder and CEO of Xiaomi, made two major announcements on Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent. The first, is that Xiaomi will hold a strategic launch event called “New Starting Point” (新起点) on 22 May; the second is more information on the tech company’s latest homegrown XRing O1 3nm chipset. The announcements also confirmed a long-circulating rumour about the highly anticipated Xiaomi electric SUV, the YU7, which will be launched at the event.
The XRing O1 chip, a System-on-Chip (SoC), has been in the works since 2021, when Xiaomi decided to move into automotives and make another chip following their 2017 Pinecore Surge S1. The exciting news is that Xiaomi designed and developed its new chip with 3nm process in-house, the first in Mainland China and the fourth in the world, after Apple, Qualcomm and MediaTek. Lei Jun claims that the company has already invested over 13.5 billion RMB (1.87 billion USD) and also pledged to spend at least 50 billion RMB (6.94 billion USD) in total over 10 years in chipmaking.
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Some commentators noted that Xiaomi stated that the chip was developed and designed in Mainland China but did not mention that it would be manufactured there. Sources indicate that it will, in fact, be built using TSMC’s 3nm process in Taiwan. Most netizens, while congratulating Xiaomi for achieving an in-house 3nm design, are equally concerned that Mainland China still doesn’t have the capabilities to manufacture such chips.