Chinese EV makers bet on in-house chips to make cars smarter and more autonomous

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Chinese EV makers are showcasing advanced in-house chips at Auto China, powering smarter vehicles and challenging global tech leaders

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Daniel Renin ShanghaiandThemis ChenPublished: 8:30am, 24 Apr 2026Chinese electric vehicle (EV) makers and supply-chain vendors, from Tesla rivals Xpeng to Nio and lidar sensor producer Hesai Group, will display their technological advances on a new front – in-car chips – at the Auto China show in Beijing as the country’s automotive industry makes rapid progress.Carmakers and vendors are designing and developing chips to power autonomous driving and in-car entertainment systems. These chips boast computing power on par with blockbuster products made by chip giant Nvidia, and are expected to add lustre to Chinese-made EVs that are rapidly gaining popularity globally.

“If we use chips provided by third-party suppliers, we cannot guarantee that the chips would cater to our needs in developing lidar sensors,” said David Li Yifan, CEO of Hesai, the world’s largest maker of lidar sensors for cars, at a media briefing last week. “We want to design and make the chips ourselves because no one else specifically develops chiplets for a lidar maker.”

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Computing power has been in high demand over the past decade as Chinese EV makers have doubled down on smart vehicles, banking on artificial intelligence and digital technologies to make vehicles more autonomous and comfortable.

A system-on-chip (SoC) that processes data from a vehicle’s cameras and sensors offers strong computing power to support rapidly evolving intelligent features.

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Xpeng’s indigenous Turing chip, designed for level 4 autonomous driving capabilities, was three times more powerful than Nvidia’s Drive Orin X installed in its existing smart vehicles, according to He Xiaopeng, CEO of the Guangzhou-based EV maker.

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