Xiaomi headquarters in Beijing on May 11, 2025 Photo: VCG

 
Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun announced on Monday that the company will launch its second-generation 3-nanometer mobile chip - Xring O1 - after four years of development and a total research and development (R&D) investment of 13.5 billion yuan ($1.87 billion) as of April.  

In a post on his Sina Weibo account, Lei said that Xiaomi started its chip R&D in 2014 and the company has "finally handed in its first answer sheet," noting that the project involved more than 2,500 R&D personnel and investment for this year alone will exceed 6 billion yuan. 

"I believe that this scale ranks among the top three in the domestic semiconductor design field in terms of R&D investment and team size," Lei said, "Without great determination and courage, without sufficient R&D investment and technical strength, Xring O1would not be where it is today."

The Xring O1 is expected to debut at a product launch event on Thursday, Lei said in a separate Weibo post on Monday. At the event, the company will also release the Xiaomi 15s Pro smartphone and Xiaomi Pad 7 Ultra. 

Lei did not include technical and other details about the new chip in his Weibo posts on Monday. 

The release of the Xring O1 represents a breakthrough in 3nm chip design on the Chinese mainland, closely following the international advanced level; Xiaomi will become the fourth company in the world to release its own 3nm process mobile phone processor chip after Apple, Qualcomm and MediaTek, CCTV News said in a post on Sina Weibo on Monday. 

Xiang Ligang, a telecom industry expert, told the Global Times on Monday that Chinese firms are advancing the development of their chips thanks to the support from domestic industries.

Xiang stressed the importance of domestic firms developing their own chips, although there is still more work to be done to successfully commercialize a new chip after its launch.

Chinese researchers had produced far more research papers on chip design and fabrication than any other country. Among 475,000 English-language chip design and manufacturing-related articles that were published during the five-year period from 2018 to 2023, China accounted for 34 percent of all semiconductor research publications, followed by European nations collectively at 18 percent and the US at 15 percent, according to a report by the Emerging Technology Observatory at Georgetown University, Xinhua reported on March 6.  

Global Times