Xiaomi has unveiled three in-house Xring chips, one of which will debut next month in the Xiaomi 18 Fold, as the company advances its goal of designing its own silicon rather than buying it from Qualcomm and MediaTek.

What the new chips do

Xiaomi (HKEX: 1810) introduced three in-house processors, headlined by the 3nm Xring O3 phone chip manufactured by TSMC (NYSE: TSM). The 3nm process class is among the most advanced chipmaking technologies in commercial use, and TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, also fabricates the leading-edge processors behind Apple's iPhones and Nvidia's AI accelerators. According to Xiaomi, the processor logged 5,228,014 points on AnTuTu, a widely used mobile benchmark suite — the first time a mobile system-on-chip has passed the five-million mark.

The company claims the Xring O3's 10-core CPU delivers a 60% performance boost over its earlier chip, while the new 16-core GPU offers 85% better graphics performance and power efficiency is up 64%. The O3 is also described as the world's first mobile processor to support LPDDR6 memory, with speeds of up to 113.8 GB/s; LPDDR6 is the latest generation of the low-power memory standard published by JEDEC, the industry body that defines memory specifications, with on-device AI as a key target workload. For AI tasks, the chip delivers 200 TOPS of tensor performance, and its neural engine is 45% faster than before. Notably, these benchmark figures are the company's own claims.

The chip was developed in 459 days and will first ship in the Xiaomi 18 Fold and the Pad 9 Pro Max in China this September.

The second chip, the Xring O100, is a 6nm AI accelerator that uses a special design to stack the processor and memory together until it reaches 1.22 TB/s of bandwidth, a configuration that helps cut delays when the chip handles AI tasks. Pairing compute and memory that closely mirrors the design logic of datacenter AI accelerators, where memory bandwidth rather than raw compute is often the limiting factor for large models. Xiaomi intends the chip to run AI models inside phones, cars, and robots, with commercial use set for 2027.

The third chip, the Xring D100, is designed for self-driving cars. Xiaomi calls it China's first high-compute smart-driving processor made with a 3nm process. It features a 20-core CPU and a 16-core NPU, supports up to 160GB of memory, and can run large AI models with up to 200 billion parameters. Validation for the chip is complete, but the automotive version will not arrive until 2027. Xiaomi has not disclosed how fast the chip is in TOPS or which car will receive it first. The segment it targets is already contested: Nvidia sells its Drive platform to automakers, and Qualcomm has been expanding its own automotive chip line.

Why Xiaomi is making its own chips

Xiaomi's electric vehicles currently use chips from Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA). The company restarted its chip development program in 2021 and has since invested more than 21 billion yuan ($3.1 billion). It now has a team of nearly 3,000 engineers working on chips.

Devices using the earlier Xring O1 chip have passed one million in shipments, though only about 150,000 of those were phones sold since May 2025. The target for the new foldable phone is between 200,000 and 300,000 units.

Most of Xiaomi's phones will still use chips from Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) and MediaTek (TWSE: 2454), but an in-house chip gives the company more leverage in talks with its suppliers. It is a path other top phone brands have taken: Apple has shipped its own A-series processors in iPhones since 2010, Google has used its in-house Tensor chips since 2021, and Samsung builds Exynos processors — routes that let vendors tie hardware and software more tightly together. Huawei, on the other hand, was forced to make its own Kirin chips because U.S. sanctions cut it off from Qualcomm. Xiaomi faces no such restriction but is choosing to design silicon anyway.

The company recently posted a 2.6 billion yuan operating loss on its newer businesses, including electric vehicles and AI, in the three months to June 2026. Nio, Li Auto, Xpeng, and BYD are already running their own in-house driving silicon. For Xiaomi, the near-term checkpoints are already on the calendar: the Xring O3 reaches consumers in the Xiaomi 18 Fold this September, while both the O100 and the automotive D100 carry 2027 timelines.