TSLA Competitor? Xiaomi Joins NIO in Race to Build In-House Chips for Self-Driving Cars

Badar Shaikh

August 25, 2026 4 min read

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Chinese tech giant Xiaomi Corp.has unveiled its in-house self-driving chip, which will be deployed for commercial use in 2027.

Xiaomi Touts 3-nm Process

According to a report by CnEVPost on Monday, Xiaomi said that the Xring D100 will be built on a 3-nm process and features a 20-core CPU and a 16-core NPU.

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The company says it will also run Large Language Models (LLMs) with 200 billion parameters locally. Xiaomi's EVs currently mainly rely on NVIDIA Corp's Thor chips for smart-driving systems, the report said.

Notably, Chinese automaker NIO Inc.'s CEO William Lihad earlier touted the company's in-house chip design and self-driving efforts, saying that it would be more cost-efficient than its competitors.

On the other hand, XPeng Inc.has also outlined its roadmap to Level 4 autonomous driving by 2028, with the Mona L03 crossover SUV sporting upgraded tech.

Tesla Touts Terafab

Meanwhile, Tesla Inc.CEO Elon Muskhad touted that the EV giant would have its own semiconductor manufacturing facility that would develop chips using a 2-nm process and would not require clean rooms. Months later, Musk revealed the Terafab facility in Grimes County, Texas, which could go on to become the largest building ever built.

Terafab's chip efforts, however, could be geared more toward Space Exploration Technologies Corp.than Tesla, with Musk saying SpaceX would consume three times as much Terafab AI compute as Tesla

However, doubts have been raised by critics over Tesla's self-driving efforts, with investor Ross Gerbersaying that he could not see the current HW4/AI4 chips being able to support Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology.

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