During the recent Xiaomi Investor Day, Xiaomi’s founder, chairman, and CEO, Lei Jun, made a monumental announcement regarding the company’s in-house silicon efforts: shipments for the proprietary XRING O1 chip have officially surpassed the one million mark. This milestone cements Xiaomi’s position among the elite few smartphone manufacturers capable of designing their own advanced SoCs, reducing reliance on standard Qualcomm and MediaTek architectures. As we analyze this development, it is important to note that products pioneering these early custom chipsets and massive R&D investments are introduced exclusively in China for now.
XRING O1 Chip
The XRING O1 chip, which debuted last year utilizing an advanced 3nm process, marks a significant leap in Xiaomi’s hardware independence. Lu Weibing, Partner and President of the Mobile Phone Division, confirmed that this is merely the foundation, establishing a cadence for yearly upgraded silicon releases.
The financial commitment behind this initiative is staggering. Restarted in 2021, Xiaomi’s self-developed large-scale chip project operates on a 10-year roadmap with a projected investment of at least 50 billion yuan (approximately $6.94 billion USD). As of late April 2025, R&D expenditure for the XRING architecture had already exceeded 13.5 billion yuan (approximately $1.87 billion USD).
XRING O3 is coming
Looking ahead, we must highlight a major development that our own team recently brought to light. As exclusively leaked by our codebase teardown experts, a mysterious new foldable device bearing the model number “2608BPX34C” and the codename “lhasa” has surfaced. As we first reported to the world, this flagship is expected to launch as the Xiaomi MIX Fold 5—or potentially the Xiaomi 17 Fold and will be powered by the upcoming XRING O3 chip. Our exclusive findings confirm that Xiaomi is skipping the “XRING O2” nomenclature entirely. Furthermore, Lei Jun confirmed today that future iterations of these self-developed chips will break beyond mobile, extending into the automotive sector to power upcoming Xiaomi cars.
