Li Auto's semiconductor subsidiary is preparing its first round of outside financing, targeting several billion yuan at a pre-money valuation of around 15 billion yuan (about $2.22 billion), according to a LatePost report. The raise follows the July creation of a standalone chip company, the latest move in the EV maker's effort to run its silicon business independently.
The playbook resembles Nio's: Nio's chip unit Shenji closed a 2.257 billion yuan first round in February at a post-money valuation near 8.27 billion yuan, while Sunrise, spun off from SenseTime's large-chip division, has gathered roughly 4 billion yuan across seven rounds. Registration filings show a web of newly formed "Mach"-branded entities in Hong Kong and Shanghai, with CTO Xie Yan — the driving force behind the in-house Mach M100 chip — serving as a legal representative for one of them.
The chip team numbers about 200 people, focused on AI computing architecture, chip design and related software, with vehicle-side and cloud-side projects running in parallel. The Mach M100, made on a 5nm automotive-grade process and delivering 1,280 TOPS per chip, already features in several new or refreshed models launched this year, and a cloud inference chip using the same dataflow architecture is in development.
Outside capital could relieve pressure on a company that lost 3.98 billion yuan in the first half of the year. Li Auto is also open to selling chips and silicon carbide modules to other manufacturers, though its custom battery packs will stay in-house. Retention is a concern — some core chip staff have left for embodied-intelligence firms — so executives have received share options tied to Li Auto's Hong Kong market value reaching HK$1 trillion.