Nio unveils in-house developed autonomous driving chip

Nio unveiled its first in-house developed autonomous driving chip, which will be used in the ET9 executive flagship sedan, at Nio Day 2023 on Dec 23. already available for pre-order, but deliveries won't begin until the first quarter of 2025.

The chip, called the Shenji NX9031, is built on a 5 nm process with over 50 billion transistors and supports 32-core CPUs.

Its computing power is comparable to four Nvidia Drive Orin X chips, according to William Li, Nio's founder, chairman, and CEO, without mentioning specific numbers.

Nio's current NT 2.0 platform-based models come standard with four Orin X chips, totaling 1,016 Tops of computing power.

Nio's current use of four Nvidia Drive Orin chips is adequate for smart driving algorithms, but the next-generation smart driving chip should do better, Bai Jian, the company's vice president in charge of the hardware business, said on Dec 21 on Weibo.

A year ago, there were media reports that Nio was working on autonomous driving and LiDAR chips.

Nio's chip team was formed in the second half of 2020 as part of Nio's smart driving hardware division, which is headed by Bai, who has served as general manager of Xiaomi's chip business and as OPPO's hardware director, according to an Oct2022 LatePost report.

Nio's chip team was working on two chips at the time, a high-level self-driving chip and a LiDAR chip, the report said.

At the Nio IN 2023 Innovation Day event on Sep 21, Nio unveiled its first in-house chip, a LiDAR master chip.