Xiaomi unveils in-house 3nm chips, backs silicon push with 50B yuan
What's the deal? Xiaomi used its first appearance at IFA 2026 in Berlin to unveil its own in-house processors, the Xuanjie (XRing) series. The line spans premium smartphones, edge AI, and autonomous driving.
The flagship is the XRing O3, a 3nm system-on-chip built by TSMC. It packs 24 billion transistors, a 10-core CPU clocked up to 4.35GHz, a 16-core GPU, and an NPU reaching 200 TOPS.
Why now? Early benchmarks show the O3 outperforming QualcommDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →'s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 while drawing less power, and it supports the new LPDDR6 memory. Its global debut lands on September 7 with the foldable Xiaomi 18 Fold in China.
What's the endgame? Xiaomi also showed the 6nm XRing O100 AI accelerator, which stacks DRAM directly onto the NPU to hit 330 tokens per second of on-device inference. For cars, the 3nm XRing D100 targets autonomous vehicles, supporting 160GB of unified memory and AI models with 200 billion parameters — both ship in 2027.
President William Lu called the chip program the cornerstone of Xiaomi's "Human x Car x Home" ecosystem, tying smartphones to electric vehicles and smart home devices.
What could go wrong? Xiaomi will keep its partnerships with Qualcomm and MediaTekDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, but its move toward hardware independence is costly. It has committed 50 billion yuan to the effort and already spent more than 21 billion on research and development.
The signal: By designing across phones, AI, and vehicles, Xiaomi joins the ranks of device makers seeking to control their own silicon. Owning the chip stack is increasingly the price of competing at the top end.
Read more: startupper.gr
Image credit: Sangitiana
