Xiaomi launches Xring O3, its first 3nm phone chip built by TSMC

Xiaomi unveiled three in-house Xring chips on Monday, one of which will debut next month in the Xiaomi 18 Fold.

The company is focusing on furthering its goal of designing its own silicon rather than buying it from Qualcomm and Media.

What do Xiaomi’s new chips do?

Xiaomi (HKEX: 1810) has launched three in-house chips, with the main one being the 3nm Xring O3 phone processor made by TSMC (NYSE: TSM). Xiaomi says the processor logged 5,228,014 points on AnTuTu, making it the first time a mobile system-on-chip has passed the five-million mark.

The company claims Xring O3’s 10-core CPU offers a 60% performance boost over its earlier chip. The new 16-core GPU gives 85% better graphics performance, and power efficiency is up 64%. The O3 is also the world’s first mobile processor to support LPDDR6 memory, with speeds up to 113.8 GB/s.

For AI tasks, the chip delivers 200 TOPS of tensor performance, and its neural engine is 45% faster than before. Notably, these benchmark scores 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 is the Xring O100, 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. This design helps cut delays when the chip handles AI tasks. Xiaomi wants this chip to run AI models inside phones, cars, and robots. It is set for commercial use in 2027.

The third chip, the Xring D100, is for self-driving cars. Xiaomi calls it China’s first high-compute smart-driving processor made with a 3nm process. It has a 20-core CPU and a 16-core NPU that supports up to 160GB of memory and can run large AI models with up to 200 billion parameters.

Validation for this chip is complete, but the car version will not arrive until 2027. Xiaomi has not said how fast this chip is in TOPS or which car will get it first.

Why is Xiaomi making its own chips?

Currently, Xiaomi’s electric vehicles use chips from Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA). Xiaomi restarted its chip development program in 2021 and has since invested more than 21 billion yuan ($3.1 billion). The company 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. But 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 will give Xiaomi more leverage in talks with its suppliers.

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.

Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free.