Xiaomi launches the Xring O3, a 3nm SoC for its mobile devices, as it seeks to reduce reliance on foreign chips from longtime suppliers Qualcomm and MediaTek
Xiaomi Corp. launched a mobile processor for its marquee devices, putting pressure on Qualcomm Inc. and MediaTek Inc., which for years supplied the key component to the Chinese company.
BloombergGao Yuan
Context & Ripple Effects
Xiaomi has been building toward this since late 2024, when reports surfaced that it was preparing a self-designed smartphone SoC to loosen its dependence on Qualcomm and MediaTek. The Xring O1 followed in May 2025, with Lei Jun disclosing a roughly $1.9 billion investment in the first chip and a commitment of $6.9B or more over the next decade.
The Xring O3 extends that arc into Xiaomi's marquee devices — the tier where Qualcomm and MediaTek have historically owned the slot. For Qualcomm, already reporting year-over-year revenue decline and watching shares drop more than 7% pre-market on the news, losing volume at its largest Chinese customer compounds an existing pressure; MediaTek, meanwhile, has been diversifying toward AI chips for data centers.
First-order effects
Qualcomm and MediaTek face direct share erosion at Xiaomi, as the company that once anchored their China volumes now designs its own 3nm silicon for flagship phones and tablets.
Second-order effects
Qualcomm must defend the relationship on pricing or feature exclusivity — its mid-range Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 launched via Xiaomi first, a launch-partner role now at risk if Xiaomi's in-house chips scale down the product stack.
Third-order effects
If Lei Jun's decade-long, multi-billion-dollar design budget holds, the pattern points toward top-tier phone makers treating leading-edge SoCs as proprietary assets, shrinking the merchant market for mobile application processors to second-tier OEMs.
The trend: Flagship handset makers are converting supplier relationships into in-house silicon programs, steadily carving away the merchant SoC market that Qualcomm and MediaTek built their mobile businesses on.
Xiaomi is the Chinese tech giant. Their phones compete with iPhones. Their new CPU roughly matches Apple cores on single threaded tasks, and is much faster in multithreaded execution. Of course, Apple may soon announce their next processor, so this edge may not last long. And
Xiaomi's Xring O3 has achieved an AnTuTu score of 5.22 million, far surpassing every smartphone processor currently available. Its GPU performance has improved by a massive 85%. The chip features six ultra-large CPU cores plus four additional cores, and is also the first to
This is extremely interesting. What's going on here? XRING 03 is trivial, high-end SoC from Xiaomi. What the hell is 0100 though? 6nm, Wafer-on-wafer NPU-DRAM bonding with 1.4µm pitch. Similar philosophy to Logic Folding. I'm surprised that TSMC (apparently) fabbed that.
Xiaomi launches new Xring chip, partners with TSMC for production TSMC will manufacture the new chip using its 3-nanometre production technology. Yes it's complicated...Why not Huawei? Consumer devices...no coherent policy all the way down... https://www.reuters.com/...
near the Apple A20 launch but Android-side SoCs being far away from iOS land on single-thread performance are the old times (except Google Tensor. _that_ one sucks)