Chinese automaker Nio is now licensing its proprietary autonomous driving chip, which could potentially include robotics companies, it’s been working on for the past five years.
The Shanghai-based company, which reported delivering nearly 220,000 of its premium electric vehicles to customers in 2024, revealed the development in its Q3 earnings call.
Confirmation of the arrangement by CEO William Li backed up a report by Chinese media outlet LatePost in mid-November that the firm made a deal with an automotive semiconductor company.
Nio is understood to have spent billions of dollars developing the Shenji NX9031 chip, and the licensing of the tech will constitute the first revenue it has generated. It is already in use in Nio vehicles, including the ET9 sedan, which was released in March and features two chips.
According to the EV maker, the chip — which packs 50 billion transistors — features computing power that is four times greater than that of Nvidia’s Orin-X, which it has used previously.
The news follows a couple of significant moves over the past few months that suggested Nio was intensifying its efforts on chip tech to seek a return on its investments.
In June, it established Anhui Shenji Technology — which had previously functioned as an internal unit working on chips — as a separate legal entity. This week, Nio confirmed a LatePost report that Anhui Shenji had formed a joint venture with Axera — an automotive chip company — and another company, OmniVision.
“We are leveraging our partners of this joint venture to sell our chip and also our IC design capabilities to other clients and also potential users,” Li said on the earnings call.
Li went on to explain that usage will not be restricted to automotive applications.
“We are going to share our chip solution and the technologies with more industry players, both from the automotive as well as from the non-automotive industry,” he continued. “We do see a good potential of applying this high-computing power resonant chip on different types of devices — for example, on robots. So we will work with our tech partners together to explore more use cases and also application scenarios.”
Li also used the call to underline the specification of the chip and that Nio was committed to its success.
“Our NX1931 is the first smart driving chip made with a five-nanometer process, and its tape-out mass production application on the car and also full-stack operations were all earlier than the competitors of similar performance in the industry. For the long term, we will continue our investments and also efforts in the chip-related technologies.”
There was no mention, however, of what any licensing arrangement will mean in monetary value, although industry insiders have suggested that fees for system-on-a-chip tech licensing can be lucrative.
Nio reported a net loss of about $488.9 million in the third quarter, although Li said: “Our business target is to achieve profit for the full year 2026 on a non-GAAP basis.”
He has long been bullish on the potential of Nio’s chips, telling an EV industry conference in March: “If you want to buy the best chips, you can come to Nio.”