China’s Xiaomi is planning a next-gen phone chip, but won’t release one yearly like Apple
In this photo illustration, the logo of Xiaomi’s XRing O1 chipset is seen on May 19, 2025 in Beijing, China. Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun announced on the evening of May 15 that the company’s self-developed smartphone SoC, XRING 01, will be officially launched in late May.
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Chinese technology giant Xiaomi is planning a new high-end chip for its smartphones, a top executive at the company told CNBC, but won’t release one on a yearly basis like rival Apple.
Xu Fei, the vice president of Xiaomi, discussed the firm’s semiconductor ambitions, giving details about its roadmap for the product.
Xiaomi’s focus on developing its own chips mirrors efforts by top smartphone makers like Apple, Samsung and Huawei, as the Beijing-headquartered firm looks to expand its share globally, particularly at the more expensive end of the market.
Last year, Xiaomi launched a system-on-chip called the XRing 01 for its own smartphones. It is based on a 3 nanometer manufacturing process, one of the most advanced on the market. A system-on-chip, or SoC, is a type of semiconductor that contains different components that help run a device.
Xiaomi at the time committed to invest at least 50 billion yuan ($7 billion) over the next 10 years to develop its own chips.
Xu said that the company was “planning ahead” for its next generation of chip, but said she can’t promise it will release a new SoC each year.
“We are a a newcomer here, we need to learn and we need to plan,” Xu said.
Apple first launched its own system-on-chips in 2010 under the A series moniker. It has released a new A series semiconductor each year, with the latest one, called the A19, featured in the iPhone 17 models.
Xu revealed the thinking behind Xiaomi’s release timeline and how it relates to the company’s return on investment. There will be 1 million units of the XRing 01 shipped, Xu said, but Xiaomi will need to produce 10 million units per chip release for it to be a breakeven part of the business.
“So for us, we know we probably need to have ten years patience for the SoC to finally break even,” Xu told CNBC. “So at the first time, we just need to make sure the experience is good enough, the performance is good enough.”
Why Xiaomi is designing chips
An SoC is a critical part of a smartphone, acting like the brain of the device. Apple has had success designing its own chips because it is able to have greater control of the integration between its hardware and software.
That means the hardware can be tailored to more effeciently run the software, creating a better experience for the user.
Xiaomi has its own Android-based operating system called HyperOS and a suite of artificial intelligence applications called HyperAI. A custom-made chip for its own devices could help power this software more efficiently.
“It brings in vertical expertise to provide a tightly integrated experience with HyperOS and HyperAI to its ecosystem similar to Apple or Google,” Neil Shah, partner at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.
While Xiaomi is a major smartphone player, it sells products spanning from smartwatches to rice cookers, refrigerators and electric vehicles. Developing an SoC for smartphones will give it expertise to develop silicon for other products too, Shah said.
Where does that leave Qualcomm and MediaTek?
Xiaomi’s smartphones currently rely on a combination of chips from U.S. firm Qualcomm and Taiwanese company MediaTek.
The Xiaomi 17 smartphone which was launched this week, for example, features Qualcomm’s latest SoC.
Xiaomi’s Xu said the company is going to continue using Qualcomm and MediaTek products even as it develops its own semiconductors.
“For Qualcomm, MediaTek, they are super, extremely good partners. We’ve been working them for 15 years, so we will continue this path. And at the same time, we’ll select … [the] right product to try our own chipset. We are going with two solutions at the same time,” Xu said.
“So we made it very clear to our partners: don’t be too worried at all.”
Charges against Jeffrey Epstein were announced on July 8, 2019 in New York City. Epstein will be charged with one count of sex trafficking of minors and one count of conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking of minors.
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Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon are among those who appeared in partially redacted files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that were released on Friday by Democrats in the House Oversight Committee.
The committee earlier embarked on a probe to evaluate whether the federal government mishandled its case against Epstein and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence following a 2022 conviction for recruiting teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein.
President Donald Trump had promised voters on the campaign trail that he would release government documents related to Epstein, who was arrested in the summer of 2019 on sex trafficking charges and died in a New York federal prison, reportedly by suicide, before trial.
However, Trump has refused to endorse the release of any Epstein files since returning to the White House in January, and Republicans in Congress have followed his lead, keeping the documents out of the public’s view.
Democrats in the committee on Friday released redacted pages from a new batch of files they obtained through their probe without giving their Republican peers advanced notice. They were rebuked for the move.
In a statement on Friday, the committee said that the batch included 8,544 documents in response to a subpoena in August, and that, “Further review of the documents, which were redacted to protect the identity of victims, is ongoing.”
The latest batch of documents received by the committee from the Justice Department contained itineraries and notes by Epstein memorializing invitations he’d sent, trips he’d planned and meetings he’d booked with tech and business leaders.
Demonstrators gather for a press conference calling for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files outside the United States Captiol on Wednesday September 03, 2025 in Washington, DC.
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One of the itineraries indicated that Epstein expected Musk to make a trip to his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands on Dec. 6, 2014, but then asked “is this still happening?”
Musk told Vanity Fair in 2019 that he had visited Epstein’s New York City mansion and that Epstein “tried repeatedly to get me to visit his island,” but the Tesla CEO had declined.
In June, Musk wrote in a post on X, that he thought Trump and his administration were withholding Epstein-related files from the public view in order to protect the president’s reputation.
“Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files,” Musk, who was in the midst of a public spat with the president, wrote at the time. “That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
Trump was mentioned in previously released court documents from the Epstein case, but has not been formally accused of wrongdoing.
Musk started the year leading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an effort to slash the size of the federal government and reduce the power of various regulatory agencies. He left DOGE in May, and he and the president proceeded to hurl insults at each other in public over a number of disagreements.
However, Trump and Musk remain close enough that they sat together at a memorial service for Charlie Kirk earlier this month after the right-wing activist was assassinated while speaking at a university in Utah.
The partially redacted files also indicated Epstein had breakfast with Bannon on Feb. 16, 2019, and lunch with investor Peter Thiel on Nov. 27, 2017. Bannon is a long-time Trump ally, and Thiel was a major backer of Trump ahead of the 2016 election who spoke at the Republican National Convention.
The files also mentioned that Epstein booked a “tentative breakfast party” with Microsoft founder Bill Gates, historically a supporter of Democrats, in December 2014.
Musk, Thiel, Bannon and Gates weren’t immediately available for comment.
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