NIO founder William Li revealed that the company’s self-developed chips have cumulatively shipped over 550,000 units – replacing costly external purchases. At its peak, NIO spent $300 million per year on Nvidia chips. With self-developed chips now mass-produced, NIO has turned R&D investment into long-term savings, significantly boosting.

The star chip is the Shenji NX9031, the world’s first 5nm automotive-grade intelligent driving chip co-developed with TSMC. It features a 32-core big.LITTLE CPU, LPDDR5x (8533Mbps), an ISP with 6.5G Pixel/s processing power, and sub-5ms AI inference latency. One Shenji chip equals four Nvidia Orin-X chips in performance, slashing the number of chips per vehicle.

Shenji NX9031 already powers NIO ET9, ES9, ES8, and will soon land in the 2026 Onvo L90 (priced 200k-300k RMB). NIO has also started selling the chip externally. Another self-developed chip, the Yangjian LiDAR controller, is also in production.

Thanks to in-house chips, NIO turned profitable in Q4 2025 (adjusted operating profit RMB 1.25B) and delivered 83,465 vehicles in Q1 2026 (+98.3% YoY).

Li also called for industry-wide chip standardization. A single NIO ES9 uses over 4,000 chips across 1,000 part numbers – huge redundancy. NIO aims to cut that to 400 types, potentially saving thousands of RMB per car and over RMB 100B industry-wide.

ICgoodFind :
550k self-developed chips shipped, $300M saved – NIO proves vertical integration pays off. Shenji NX9031 is a game-changer.