Geely considers a two-chip L3 driving system built on Nio's Shenji M97

Geely is evaluating the M97 smart-driving chip from Nio's semiconductor arm Shenji (GeniTech), with a preliminary plan to pair two of them for a Level 3 autonomous-driving system, according to a 36Kr report citing people familiar with the matter. The report stopped short of confirming any nomination or supply agreement, and no target models, procurement volumes, or mass-production date were disclosed.

Co-developed with Axera Semiconductor, the M97 is the pair's first driver-assistance chip built for third-party customers, offering more than 700 TOPS of computing power — well above Horizon Robotics' Journey 6P at 560 TOPS. A launch is expected in the third quarter. Leapmotor and Chery have also shown interest, though the state of those talks is unclear. The chip's market opening comes as Chinese carmakers look for more affordably priced domestic high-compute silicon while keeping control of their own driver-assistance algorithms.

The Axera collaboration is structurally unusual: rather than an outright IP purchase or the sale of an existing chip, engineers from the two companies co-developed a customized product around Shenji's core modules and architecture. An industry source told 36Kr this technology-supply arrangement has already generated hundreds of millions of yuan in licensing fees for Nio, with further upside if shipments scale.

Shenji's external push is showing other progress too: it has secured a nomination for an edge-inference project from the Hefei government, and its February first funding round raised 2.257 billion yuan ($330 million) at a post-money valuation of 8.27 billion yuan, leaving Nio with a controlling 62.7% stake. Nio's in-house NX9031 chip, meanwhile, has been rolled out across the entire Nio and Onvo lineups, with cumulative shipments topping 300,000 units as of July.