Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi on Monday unveiled the Xring O3, its second-generation in-house mobile processor, manufactured by TSMC using 3-nanometre technology. The chip is expected to power Xiaomi's upcoming flagship foldable phone, with shipment targets of 200,000 to 300,000 units — a direct play for Huawei's dominance in China's premium foldable market.
The Xring O3 arrives just one year after Xiaomi's first proprietary chip, the Xring O1, which has now surpassed 1 million cumulative device shipments across smartphones, tablets, and watches. Xiaomi has invested over $3 billion in chip development and expanded its semiconductor team to 3,000 engineers.
But Xiaomi is thinking far beyond phones. Two additional TSMC-manufactured chips were revealed: the Xring O100, a 6-nanometre neural processing unit designed to run Xiaomi's MiMo large language model directly on consumer devices, and the Xring D100, a 3-nanometre chip purpose-built for autonomous driving. Both have completed development and are scheduled for deployment in 2027.
The announcements come against a challenging market backdrop — global smartphone shipments are projected to decline 14% in 2026, driven by rising memory and component costs. Xiaomi sold 65 million handsets in the first half of 2026, down from 84 million in the same period last year, though at a higher average selling price of $198.
Xiaomi's push into in-house silicon mirrors a broader industry trend, as device makers seek to reduce dependence on Qualcomm and MediaTek while differentiating products through custom AI and imaging capabilities.
