According to Late Auto news, NIO’s self-developed advanced intelligent driving chip “Shenqi NX9031” has begun technology licensing, providing technical authorization to an automotive chip company.If it is a system-level SoC technology authorization, the order value could reach hundreds of millions. This means that NIO chips are seeing revenue for the first time beyond internal use.
In June 2025, NIO officially integrated its most “money-burning” chip business into an independent project entity—Anhui Shenqi Technology Co., Ltd., with Bai Jian, head of NIO’s chip department and smart hardware, serving as the legal representative.At that time, sources close to NIO revealed that after the independent split of the chip business, it would undertake orders from other automakers. This move is also seen as a key step for NIO to achieve its goal of “profitability in four quarters.” NIO’s self-developed intelligent driving chip “Shenqi NX9031” is manufactured using a 5nm automotive-grade process, featuring over 50 billion transistors, with both the chip and underlying software designed independently. The chip adopts a 32-core CPU architecture, integrating a high-performance ISP with high dynamic range and a self-developed inference acceleration unit NPU.From performance data, the actual computing power of the Shenqi NX9031 is about four times that of NVIDIA’s Orin-X, with a memory bandwidth of 546GB/s, which is double that of NVIDIA’s Thor-U chip, capable of processing data from up to 25 high-definition cameras simultaneously, with a data processing latency of less than 5 milliseconds.Cost reduction is one of the important considerations for NIO’s self-developed chips. Li Bin previously revealed: “In 2024, NIO spent over $300 million on NVIDIA’s Orin-X chips, while this year, after applying self-developed chips, the cost per vehicle can be optimized by about 10,000 yuan.” At the same time, NIO can independently introduce strategic investments through its chip business to share R&D costs and activate business organizational vitality. Li Bin publicly stated at the China Electric Vehicle Hundred People Forum in March 2025 that NIO’s chips and operating systems are open to the entire industry, “If anyone wants to buy the best chips, they can come to NIO.”
Despite the strategic significance of NIO’s independent chip business, it also faces many challenges. To date, the intelligent driving field has gradually seen the emergence of leading companies, and there are now many chip suppliers available for automakers to choose from, such as the domestic intelligent driving suppliers Horizon and Black Sesame Intelligence, which currently have a high market share.In this context, the technology licensing of “Shenqi NX9031” is undoubtedly a positive signal, as the chip business’s self-sustaining capability will strongly support NIO’s early profitability.