Nio's cumulative production of in-house developed chips exceeds 550,000 units

William Li, founder, chairman, and CEO of the Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker, revealed the figure at a semiconductor industry summit in Shanghai on Thursday. The in-house developed chips have brought significant cost benefits to Nio. The Yangjian chip helps Nio save hundreds of yuan per vehicle, Li said  

Nio's in-house Yangjian chip for LiDAR

Nio has achieved initial scale in its semiconductor business, with cumulative mass production of its in-house developed chips exceeding 550,000 units. William Li, founder, chairman, and CEO of the Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker, revealed the figure at a semiconductor industry summit in Shanghai on Thursday. 

The production volume is primarily composed of two core chips: the Yangjian master control chip for LiDAR, and the Shenji NX9031, which powers smart driving features. The Yangjian chip was officially launched in September 2023 and put into use in April 2024. The chip is named Yangjian, after Yang Jian, a character in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) novel Fengshen Yanyi (The Investiture of the Gods). In the novel, Yang has a third eye on his forehead, similar to the LiDAR that Nio is carrying on the roof of its latest NT 2.0 platform models. 

Yangjian is the first in-house developed chip released by Nio's smart hardware team, featuring an 8-core, 64-bit processor equipped with 8-channel, 9-bit sampling at a sampling rate of 1 GHz. The chip can efficiently capture raw data from LiDAR sensors and reduce power consumption for LiDAR by 50 percent, latency by 30 percent, and has a point cloud processing capacity of 8 million per second per second, Li said. To date, shipments of the chip have surpassed 400,000 units. 

The Shenji NX9031 chip, built on a 5 nm process, was first unveiled in December 2023. The smart driving chip was officially put into use with the delivery of the ET9 sedan in March 2025, and its shipments have exceeded 150,000 units so far. The in-house developed chips have brought significant cost benefits to Nio. The Yangjian chip helps Nio save hundreds of yuan per vehicle, Li said today. 

At the same time, the chip offers better performance and quality, validating Nio's strategy of trading short-term R&D investment for higher long-term gross margins. In his speech, Li also noted that the automotive semiconductor industry is currently facing three key challenges: a surge in demand for AI computing power, the fragmentation of chip architectures, and increased supply chain volatility. 

Nio is building core capabilities for the intelligent era through in-house developed and customized chips, committing to optimizing the performance and cost of high-value chips. Meanwhile, Nio is advancing the standardization of automotive chips, aiming to cover all vehicle chip selections with no more than 400 specifications, which will help enhance scale effects and system efficiency. 

Li expects that by 2027, about 35% to 40% of Nio's automotive semiconductors will be sourced domestically.