Li Auto Reportedly Unveils In-House M100 Chip - Joins Nio And Xpeng In China's EV Chip Race

Li Auto has reportedly developed its first in-house autonomous driving chip, the M100, joining Chinese peers Nio and Xpeng, who have already rolled out proprietary chips in production vehicles.

The M100 completed prototype production in the first quarter and passed functional, performance, and stress testing within two weeks, CnEVPost reported, citing local media.

It is now apparently being installed in small batches on prototype vehicles for road testing, with mass production and vehicle integration planned for next year. Until then, Li Auto will continue to source chips from its partners, Nvidia and Horizon Robotics.

Performance comparisons show the M100 delivers computing power equivalent to two Nvidia Thor-U chips for large language model tasks and three Thor-U chips for vision tasks using convolutional neural networks. 

Li Auto has invested billions in the project, which encompasses hardware such as NPUs and SoCs, as well as software development.

The effort is led by CTO Xie Yan, a former executive at Intel, Alibaba, and Huawei, who is driving an integrated hardware-software R & D strategy aimed at maximizing performance through software scheduling.

The move follows similar efforts by Nio and Xpeng. Nio's Shenji NX9031, unveiled in December 2023, now powers its ET9, ET5, ES6, EC6, and soon the ES8, replacing Nvidia's Orin X. 

Nio may also reportedly spin off its chip business. Xpeng launched its in-house Turing AI chip with the G7 SUV in July, followed by the new P7 sedan. Top variants use three Turing chips to deliver over 2,200 TOPS.

On Stocktwits, retail sentiment was 'bullish' for Li Auto amid 'extremely high' message volume, 'extremely bullish' for Nio with 'extremely high' message volume, and 'neutral' for Xpeng on 'high' message volume.

So far this year, Li Auto is down 5.8%, while Nio is up 45.4% and Xpeng has surged 92.1%.

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