Chinese automaker Li Auto said on Monday that it will hold its first dedicated software and artificial-intelligence event on June 15, placing a self-developed chip, a new AI brand and a push into embodied intelligence at the center of its pitch.
Called ‘Livis Day’, the event is scheduled to start for 4:30 p.m. Beijing time and billed the gathering as its “software and artificial intelligence launch event,” under the tagline “giving life to car and home” — a nod to Chehejia, or “Car and Home,” the name founder Li Xiang used when he started the company in 2015.
The event will focus on software and AI rather than a new vehicle, a departure from the product launches that usually anchor Li Auto‘s calendar.
According to LatePost, the company plans to dig into the nature of embodied intelligence and its future direction in software and AI.
“Livis” already names Li Auto‘s AI glasses, a new Livis trim of its flagship L9 sport utility vehicle, and now the event itself.
The livestream list underscores the push, with dedicated channels for the Livis AI glasses and for Li Xiang’s own Livis account running alongside the company’s main accounts on social media platforms.
A Self-Developed Chip at the Core
The event follows the launch last month of the new-generation L9 Livis, an extended-range SUV that starts at 509,800 yuan, about $75,150, with intelligence as its headline selling point.
That car was the debut platform for the Mach M100, Li Auto‘s first self-developed artificial-intelligence chip and the clearest measure of how far the company has taken its silicon investment.
The Mach M100 delivers up to 1,280 trillion operations per second of effective compute on a single chip, built on a 5-nanometer automotive-grade process, the company has said.
Li Auto calls it the world’s most powerful edge inference chip built on a dataflow architecture, a design it says gives its own software more room to optimize.
The company claims that architecture lets a single Mach M100 reach roughly three times the effective compute of Nvidia’s Thor-U, the part many rivals rely on.
The new L9 carries two of the chips, which Li Auto says pushes effective compute to five to six times that of a single Thor-U.
On the new car, the silicon pairs with an upgraded Mach VLA 2.1 system that the company says raises multimodal compute tenfold, alongside a 3D ViT perception model that fuses lidar and camera data to extend visible range by half.
The L9 Livis also adds a drive-by-wire chassis, with active suspension and steer-by-wire, for what Li Auto calls millisecond-level response across the system.
Why Li Auto Built Its Own Silicon
The chip program reflects a deliberate strategic bet rather than a one-off part.
In an interview published by Chinese outlet 42号车库, Li Auto chief technology officer Xie Yan said the company wants to be “like Apple” in chips, pairing its own silicon with its own operating system rather than selling processors to others.
Xie said the goal is vertical integration, with the deepest, most foundational technologies kept in-house to build a moat that other carmakers cannot easily match.
He cautioned that self-developing chips is a very large investment, one that only a company with enough revenue and research spending can sustain, and argued the math still favors Li Auto because a single Mach M100, once its software is tuned to the hardware, costs less than the bought-in chips it replaces.
Li Xiang has pushed back on the perception that building chips is a money-burning exercise in chasing trends.
The founder said the force behind the program is not to show off technical prowess but to solve problems that suppliers’ technology cannot.
“Li Auto’s goal is not only to excel in self-developed chips, but also to lay out more foundational core technologies,” Li Xiang said.
The company published a technical paper on the design on April 20, titled “M100: An Orchestrated Dataflow Architecture Powering General AI Computing.”
Li Auto has positioned the Mach M100 as a general-purpose AI chip able to handle both autonomous driving and large-language-model inference, and it plans to roll the part across its lineup.
The silicon will supply only the company’s own vehicles, the Apple and Tesla approach, rather than being sold on the open market.
Before the Mach M100 reached production, Li Auto leaned on Nvidia and Horizon Robotics for its driver-assistance chips, a dependence the in-house part is designed to reduce.
Xie has pointed to Tesla, whose AI4 hardware and Full Self-Driving software he cited as proof that a carmaker’s own stack can pull ahead of supplier solutions.
A Decade Bet
The chip is one piece of a wider plan that Li Auto is developing on several fronts at once.
The company is simultaneously advancing self-developed chips, operating systems, large-scale models and hardware, a stack it wants to control end to end.
Li Xiang has set a long horizon for the effort.
Over the next decade, he has said, Li Auto aims to “become the top-performing company in the field of embodied intelligence.”
He cast the new flagship in those terms, describing the L9 Livis as “not just a car” but “the pioneering work of an embodied intelligence robot.”
That framing reaches beyond driver assistance toward machines that sense and act in the physical world, the theme Li Auto has said Livis Day will explore.
Reshuffling Around Embodied Intelligence
The strategy has reshaped how the company is organized.
Li Auto completed a restructuring of its foundation-model department in late May, according to a May 29 report by LatePost.
The company created three new second-tier units tied to embodied intelligence, covering embodied engineering, embodied interaction and embodied behavior, the outlet reported.
In the same overhaul, Li Auto spun its autonomous-driving business into a separately operating second-tier department.
The changes line up the teams behind the vision Li Xiang is expected to detail on June 15.
The Livis AI Brand Beyond the Car
Livis Day also brings Li Auto‘s ambitions outside the vehicle into focus.
The Livis AI glasses, the company’s first major product beyond cars, went on sale in December at 1,999 yuan.
The glasses weigh 36 grams and received a major over-the-air software update last month, timed to the L9 Livis launch.
Li Auto has described the glasses as one of the windows through which it hopes its AI capabilities will reach more users, connecting to the car so drivers can trigger functions by voice.
That combination of cars, chips, glasses and foundation models is what the company appears set to tie together under the Livis name.
