Xiaomi's Xring O3 goes into mass production, with TSMC building it on 3nm

The Xring O3 is already in mass production and heads for a September foldable, with an AI accelerator and an autonomous driving chip behind it.

Xiaomi, which has been doubling down on self-developed chips despite an earnings slump and soaring component costs, unveiled the Xring O3 at a chip technology briefing on August 24. The Chinese tech giant says that its second generation of the in-house system-on-chip line has already entered mass production. Xiaomi introduced the first iteration of its SoC, Xring O1, in May 2025.

Two people familiar with the matter told Reuters that TSMC will manufacture the new chip on its 3nm process. One of the sources said the Xring O3 is expected to power Xiaomi's upcoming flagship folding phone, with shipments targeted at 200,000 to 300,000 units. Jiemian News, cited by TrendForce, reported that the chip will debut on the Xiaomi 18 Fold in September and will also appear in the Xiaomi Pad 9 Max.

On specifications, IT Home reported that the Xring O3 carries 24 billion transistors on a 133mm² die, a 26% increase in transistor count over its predecessor. Xiaomi's own figures for the Xring O1, as recorded on Baidu Baike, put that chip at 19 billion transistors and 109mm². EE Times China and IT Home both described the O3 as the first mobile processor able to work with LPDDR6, a new and faster grade of phone memory. Xiaomi puts the chip's memory bandwidth at 113.8GB/s, 48% higher than the O1.

Most of the redesign went into the part of the chip that handles AI. In the same TrendForce report, EE Times China was quoted stating that Xiaomi rebuilt the NPU, the block that runs AI tasks on the phone instead of sending them off to a server, around its own MiMo models. Xiaomi rates it at 200 TOPS, the usual yardstick for AI throughput, and claims a 45% gain over the O1.

The same report said extra AI accelerators have been bolted onto the CPU and the GPU, two on one and eight on the other.

Xring O3 is one of three chips on the roadmap

Xiaomi used the same briefing to launch two chips that sit outside the handset. Xiaomi launched the Xring O100, a 6nm AI accelerator built for large models, which CEO Lei Jun said on Weibo uses 3D wafer-on-wafer stacking and reaches 1.22TB/s of bandwidth. EE Times China described it as the first 6nm wafer-on-wafer 3D packaging implementation in the industry, using hybrid bonding at a 1.4µm pitch, with on-device inference of up to 330 tokens per second running Xiaomi's MiMo 3B model.

The third chip, the Xring D100, was described by IT Home as China's first 3nm high-compute processor for intelligent driving. According to that report, it pairs a 20-core CPU with a 16-core NPU and supports up to 160GB of unified memory, enough to run models of up to 200 billion parameters locally. Xiaomi says the D100 has completed development and is scheduled for deployment next year. A third source told Reuters that TSMC has been contracted to build both the O100 and the D100.

Volumes stay small against Xiaomi's shipment base

Xiaomi told analysts on an earnings call last week that cumulative shipments of devices running the Xring O1, covering smartphones, tablets and watches, had passed one million units since launch. Sources told Reuters that roughly 150,000 of those were smartphones. Set against Xiaomi's first-half shipment base, according to Visible Alpha by S&P Global data cited by Reuters, in-house silicon remains a premium-tier proposition rather than a replacement for Qualcomm or MediaTek volume.

The market Xiaomi is launching into is also tightening. Second-quarter profit fell 42.6% on component costs, and the same Visible Alpha data shows the company sold 65 million handsets in the first half of 2026 at an average price of 1,329 yuan, against 84 million units at 1,141 yuan a year earlier. The pattern of higher prices on lower volumes has been attributed to rising memory and component costs. In fact, International Data Corporation (IDC) expects global smartphone shipments to fall 14% in 2026.

Foldables put Xiaomi up against a well-defended incumbent. Huawei shipped 1.6 million foldable phones in China in the second quarter for a 68% share, followed by Honor at 13.7%, according to Smart Analytics Global figures.

Xiaomi restarted large-scale in-house chip development in 2021 and has said it will invest at least 50 billion yuan (US$7 billion) over a decade. A source told Reuters that more than 20 billion yuan (US$3 billion) has gone into Xring so far, and that the semiconductor design unit has grown past 3,000 people from 2,500 a year ago. Xiaomi's own disclosures, logged on Baidu Baike, put cumulative Xring R&D at 13.5 billion yuan as of May 2025.

The September foldable is the first real test. But at 200,000 to 300,000 units, Xiaomi is putting its own chip in a phone that ships in small numbers at a high price, which is a long way from replacing Qualcomm in the volume line-up.