Xiaomi just used an internal awards ceremony to make a very public statement about where it thinks its future is headed.
At a company-wide technology awards event held in China yesterday, Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun handed out prize money to teams across the Xiaomi Group for their technological innovations over the past year.
Xiaomi received 154 project applications from 10 different departments, with 66 projects making it to the final review stage. The projects spanned chips, imaging, AI, and advanced materials, setting what Xiaomi described as new records for both quantity and quality.
The biggest prize of the night went to Xiaomi’s XRING O1 chip team, and it’s easy to see why. The XRING O1 is a flagship mobile chip that Xiaomi says is independently developed and designed in-house. It uses a second-generation 3nm manufacturing process and features a deca-core, quad-cluster CPU architecture.
With the XRING O1, Xiaomi also crossed an important symbolic line. The company says it has become the first firm in mainland China (and only the fourth company globally) to release a 3nm-class flagship mobile chip. This puts Xiaomi in a small club dominated by some of the biggest names in the semiconductor world.
Xiaomi wants to make everything in-house
But the chip itself is only part of the story. During his speech, Lei Jun laid out what Xiaomi sees as the next phase of this strategy. In 2026, the company expects to achieve what he called a “grand convergence” on a single device: a self-developed chip, a self-developed operating system, and a self-developed large-scale AI model all working together.
Lei also revealed just how much Xiaomi is willing to spend to get there. Five years ago, the company pledged to invest 100 billion yuan in core technology R&D. It has already exceeded that, spending roughly 105 billion yuan so far.
Starting this year, Xiaomi plans to invest another 200 billion yuan over the next five years, with a sharp focus on chips, AI, and operating systems.
According to Lei, this full-stack approach is critical to building a long-term competitive edge for Xiaomi’s “people, car, and home” ecosystem, which the company says will become visible to users over time.
For more daily updates, please visit our News Section.
Stay ahead in tech! Join our Telegram community and sign up for our daily newsletter of top stories.
(Via)
Comments