Chinese tech giant Xiaomi Corp (小米) is to invest 50 billion yuan (US$6.93 billion) in developing high-end smartphone chips, firm founder Lei Jun (雷軍) said yesterday.
Xiaomi, which sells goods from smartphones to vacuum cleaners and electric vehicles, is one of China’s most prominent consumer electronics firms.
Writing on social media platform WeChat to mark the 15th year since the company’s establishment, Lei said: “Chips are the underlying core track for Xiaomi to break through in cutting-edge technology, so we will definitely make an all-out effort.”
Photo: AFP
In pursuit of Xiaomi’s semiconductor ambitions, the firm has developed an investment plan involving “at least 10 years of investment and at least 50 billion yuan,” Lei added.
Xiaomi took initial steps into semiconductors for smartphones with the launch of the firm’s first in-house chip — the Surge S1 — in 2017. However, the group was forced to halt production of the chip due to technical and financial obstacles, and has since refocused on other components as well as a move into the electric vehicle sector.
“That is not our ‘dark history.’ That is the path we have traveled,” Lei wrote.
Since 2021, Xiaomi’s chip development program has already received 13.5 billion yuan in research-and-development funds for a team of more than 2,500 employees, he said.
The announcement comes in the face of heightened technological tensions between Beijing and Washington, as both nations seek to ensure access to the most advanced components.
A number of Chinese firms are racing to develop their own chips with the aim of freeing themselves from reliance on foreign suppliers in the face of that rivalry.
“Xiaomi has always had a ‘chip dream’,” Lei wrote. “I earnestly request everyone to give us more time and patience to support our continued exploration on this road.”
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) last week recorded an increase in the number of shareholders to the highest in almost eight months, despite its share price falling 3.38 percent from the previous week, Taiwan Stock Exchange data released on Saturday showed. As of Friday, TSMC had 1.88 million shareholders, the most since the week of April 25 and an increase of 31,870 from the previous week, the data showed. The number of shareholders jumped despite a drop of NT$50 (US$1.59), or 3.38 percent, in TSMC’s share price from a week earlier to NT$1,430, as investors took profits from their earlier gains
In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence (AI), smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters has learned. Completed early this year and undergoing testing, the prototype fills nearly an entire factory floor. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, according to two people with knowledge of the project. EUV machines sit at the heart of a technological Cold
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
CHINA RIVAL: The chips are positioned to compete with Nvidia’s Hopper and Blackwell products and would enable clusters connecting more than 100,000 chips Moore Threads Technology Co (摩爾線程) introduced a new generation of chips aimed at reducing artificial intelligence (AI) developers’ dependence on Nvidia Corp’s hardware, just weeks after pulling off one of the most successful Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs) in years. “These products will significantly enhance world-class computing speed and capabilities that all developers aspire to,” Moore Threads CEO Zhang Jianzhong (張建中), a former Nvidia executive, said on Saturday at a company event in Beijing. “We hope they can meet the needs of more developers in China so that you no longer need to wait for advanced foreign products.” Chinese chipmakers are in
RSS