Nio‘s in-house chip subsidiary made its first standalone public appearance at the 2026 World AI Conference, unveiling a broadened chip line-up and new software platforms as it pushes its automotive silicon into robotics and other AI markets.
The unit, Anhui Shenji Technology, known in English as GeniTech, showed its NX9031 driving chip and a vehicle domain controller at the Shanghai event on Friday.
The company used the show to launch Ruidong, an embodied-intelligence development platform, along with a distributed-agent platform.
Nio founder and chief executive William Li wrote on Weibo that Shenji was “the only company in China” shipping chips across all three general-AI domains — autonomous driving, embodied intelligence and Agent inference.
The debut marks a public coming-out for a business Nio has built quietly over five years, and signals its ambition to turn a cost centre, the chips that power its own cars, into a supplier to the wider AI industry.
From One Driving Chip to a Family
Shenji said its line-up now runs to multiple chips, among them the NX9031X, the NX9031U and the NX9031C.
The high-end NX9031X, the assisted-driving chip Nio previously referred to simply as the NX9031 and first deployed on its ET9 sedan in March 2025, is now fitted across the Nio and Onvo ranges, with cumulative shipments the company puts at more than 300,000 units.
The mid-tier NX9031U, a 5-nanometre automotive-grade part, powers the new Ruidong platform and is pitched at running the perception and planning models that a robot’s brain requires, Shenji said.
The company gave no detail on the third chip, the NX9031C.
Ma Lin, a Nio VP of Branding and Communications, wrote on Weibo that for emerging fields such as embodied AI and Agent inference, the NX9031 series was among the few high-compute domestic chips “proven through mass production.”
Unveiled in late 2023, the flagship chip completed its tape-out in July 2024 before reaching customers, and Nio has described it as the world’s first automotive-grade 5-nanometre intelligent-driving chip.
As recently as this spring, Shenji’s in-house line ran to just the NX9031 and Yangjian, a lidar control chip, a measure of how fast it has broadened its scope.
Betting on Embodied AI
Shenji framed the expansion as a bet on the AGI era, saying it aimed to build “the best chips and solutions platform for the AGI era” and casting itself as a full-domain, full-scenario chip company rather than a captive automotive supplier.
The company said it would reuse the strengths it built in assisted driving — perception, real-time control and functional safety — across humanoid robots, driverless logistics vehicles and high-compute terminals.
The distributed-agent platform shown alongside Ruidong points to the third leg of that pitch, chips for the Agent-inference workloads that underpin AI software.
That crossover, from cars to robots, mirrors a wider push among Chinese technology firms to repurpose automotive-grade compute for the fast-growing embodied-AI field.
For Nio, the move also opens a route to external revenue from an investment that has run into the billions of yuan.
The Business Behind the Chips
Nio launched its semiconductor effort in 2021 and spun Shenji out into a separate subsidiary in mid-2025.
In February, the unit raised 2.257 billion yuan ($310 million) from a group of Chinese investors in its first external funding round.
After the deal, a Nio subsidiary keeps a controlling 62.7% of Shenji, the new investors hold 27.3%, and entities administering an employee share plan hold 10.0%, Nio said, adding that it would continue to consolidate the business.
Nio has called Shenji “primarily responsible for” its intelligent-driving chip business, a description far narrower than the AI-wide ambitions it set out at WAIC.
The company did not name the February investors or a valuation, though the financial outlet LatePost has reported a post-money value approaching 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion).
Commercialisation is already under way.
Li told investors in November 2025 that Shenji had begun licensing its chip technology to carmakers and robotics firms, the first outside revenue from the programme.
In the same month, Shenji formed a joint venture in Chongqing, Chuangyuan Zhihang Technology, with AXera Semiconductor — a chip supplier to carmakers including Geely, Leapmotor and Ford — and OmniVision Technologies, with AXera the largest shareholder at 36.4%.
The tie-up produced several hundred million yuan in licensing fees for Shenji, 36Kr said, the first material return on years of chip spending.
The push also lessens Nio‘s reliance on foreign silicon: the company spent more than $300 million on Nvidia Orin-X chips in 2024 alone.
Building separate entities for its chip, battery and sub-brand lines lets Nio raise outside capital at the unit level while keeping control at the group, and it has registered several new subsidiaries in recent months.
Anhui province, where Shenji is registered and where Nio runs three vehicle plants, has been the group’s financial anchor since a 7 billion-yuan rescue by the city of Hefei pulled it back from near-collapse in 2020, and it raised a further 4 billion yuan from two Anhui state enterprises in early 2025.
A Costly Bet for a Loss-Making Nio
Li has said the NX9031’s development cost as much as building 1,000 battery-swap stations.
Nio closed the second quarter with 107,658 deliveries, short of the 110,000 to 115,000 it had guided, and its core premium brand has been losing momentum, with ES8 volumes slipping below 10,000 a month.
The group delivered 40,597 vehicles in June, its best month of the year, though the quarterly shortfall renewed questions about demand for its higher-priced models.
