Xiaomi joins the in-house phone-chip club, taking aim at Huawei's foldables lead

Xiaomi officially unveiled the XRing O3 on Monday, its second in-house smartphone processor, made for the company by TSMC on the Taiwanese foundry's most advanced 3nm production line.

By the company's own count, the chip arrives 459 days after its first in-house design, the XRing O1, a pace that turns what once looked like a fringe bet into a routine release cycle. Xiaomi joins a club that already includes Apple, Samsung, Huawei, and Google: phone makers designing their own silicon, not to escape TSMC, which remains the only realistic fabrication path, but to change the terms of trade with Qualcomm and MediaTek, anchor a premium story, and own the platform on which new categories are sold.

The XRing O3 packs 24 billion transistors in a 133 mm² die, and its ten-core CPU uses only performance cores, no efficiency cores, an unusual choice borrowed from Apple's recent designs. The neural engine peaks at 200 TOPS. Most consequentially for the memory pipeline, the O3 is the first phone chip to natively support LPDDR6, a memory standard that is just entering the market, running at up to 10,667 Mbps. Xiaomi says the package hits about 5.22 million on AnTuTu's benchmark, the first mobile processor to clear 5 million, with a roughly 60% multi-core performance gain over the O1.

Reuters, citing people familiar with the matter, reports Xiaomi aims to ship 200,000 to 300,000 units of an upcoming foldable, the Xiaomi 18 Fold, powered by the O3. That is a deliberate attack on a category Huawei now dominates. Smart Analytics Global, cited by Reuters, put Huawei at 68% of China's foldable shipments in the second quarter, with Honor at 13.7% and Oppo at 8.5%. Xiaomi is the world's third-largest smartphone vendor, but in foldables it is still a challenger.

The O3 is not the only piece of silicon Xiaomi showed off. Alongside it, chief executive Lei Jun announced the XRing O100, a 6nm chip using 3D wafer-on-wafer stacking to put memory directly on top of logic, intended for on-device AI. The XRing D100, a 3nm design with a 20-core CPU, 16-core NPU, and 160 GB of unified memory, is aimed at the smart-car and AI-accelerator market, with commercial deployment planned for 2027. Taken together, the three chips signal that Xiaomi is no longer treating in-house silicon as a flagship-only experiment.

Lei Jun said the company has already invested around 20 billion yuan (about $3 billion, per Reuters) in the XRing line, and is on track to spend at least 50 billion yuan, roughly $7 billion at the same conversion, over a decade on its chip effort. The unit has grown to more than 3,000 people. Still, designing a chip is not the same as fabricating one. TSMC builds the O3, the O100, and the D100, and there is no near-term path to a Chinese alternative at the 3nm node. The chip is Xiaomi's by name, but the manufacturing moat remains in Taiwan.

Apple spent roughly a decade turning its own silicon into a bargaining chip with Intel. Xiaomi is now trying to compress that timeline into a single year. The O3's first real test arrives inside the Xiaomi 18 Fold later this year. If that foldable moves buyers off Huawei, the cadence is vindicated. If it does not, the 459-day cycle will deliver an O4, and Xiaomi will still be paying TSMC to make it.