Chinese EV start-up Xpeng Automobile has announced the mass production of its AI chip “Zurei”, which boasts performance exceeding that of Nvidia, and has begun a full-scale movement to seize the lead in autonomous driving technology with its own semiconductors.
🟦 Xpeng Automobile takes on the challenge of Nvidia with its in-house AI chip “Zurei” Leap forward in autonomous driving of EVs
Xpeng Automobile announced that it will mass-produce its in-house developed AI chip “Turing” from the second quarter of 2025 and start installing it in EVs. The chip is equipped with a 40-core processor and has high-performance specifications that can locally process 30 billion parameters of generative AI models, and is the core of the company’s autonomous driving platform “Canghai”.
CEO He Xiaopeng emphasized that the chip will have three times the computing performance of Nvidia’s Drive Orin X, and the chip will also be applied to Level 3 autonomous driving vehicles scheduled to be introduced at the end of 2025, flying cars (eVTOL) under development, and humanoid robots.
🟦 Why did you decide to develop it in-house?
The reason behind the shift to in-house chips was the high cost of general-purpose chips and the overload of functions. While the externally sourced AI chips are high-performance, they need to be optimized for the company’s vehicle design, resulting in cost and development inefficiencies in the process.
In recent years, China has been promoting in-house production and domestic production of semiconductors as part of its national strategy, and this move by Xpeng is in line with this trend. Other EV manufacturers, such as NIO and Li Auto, are similarly stepping up their development of their own chips for AI and autonomous driving.
🟦 Summary
This announcement is an important step for Xpeng to take the lead in hardware in autonomous driving technology. In addition, China’s EV industry as a whole is expected to accelerate the in-house production of AI chips in the future.
Xiaopeng’s Zurei chips can be deployed not only in the company’s own vehicles, but also in aerial transportation and robotics, embodying the vision of evolving from an EV company to an “AI company”.
