According to LatePost Auto, Li Auto’s chip subsidiary is advancing its first round of external financing, targeting proceeds of several billion yuan at a pre-money valuation of roughly RMB 15 billion.
Corporate registration records show Mach Intelligent Cores Limited was incorporated in Hong Kong on July 14. On August 4, Shanghai Mahe Zhixin Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mach Intelligent Cores Limited, was established with Yan Xie, CTO of Li Auto, serving as its legal representative. A few days later, Shanghai Mahe Zhixin set up another wholly-owned entity, Shanghai Mahe Xin Technology Co., Ltd., whose legal representative is Yang Wang, Joint Company Secretary of Li Auto.
It is reported that Li Auto’s in-house chip team consists of around 200 employees, mainly engaged in AI computing architecture, chip design and related software development. At present, Li Auto is simultaneously advancing two in-house chip projects for vehicle-end and cloud-side applications.
Yan Xie, CTO of Li Auto and Head of the Systems & Computing Group, is also a key driver behind the Mach M100 self-developed chip project.
In June this year, Li Auto unveiled the world’s first dynamic dataflow AI chip — Li Auto Mach M100. Unlike traditional dedicated autonomous driving chips, it functions as an integrated "brain" for cabin-drive convergence tailored for the era of large AI models.
The Mach M100 adopts a 5nm automotive-grade process and is built on the self-developed dynamic dataflow architecture. It features 24 Arm Cortex-A78AE cores clocked at 2.3GHz. Its integrated Mach 100 NPU occupies half of the entire SoC die area, comprising 56 computing units plus one data processing module, delivering a single-chip computing power of 1280 TOPS. It is the most powerful automotive-grade inference chip in mass production worldwide. Thanks to the dataflow architecture design, the Mach M100 achieves an actual operational efficiency exceeding 82%. On the memory side, it supports 8 channels of LPDDR5x with a bandwidth of up to 273GB/s.
In July this year, Li Auto also founded Shanghai Xinchuang Zhihe, another Shanghai-based chip firm, with Yang Wang, a senior executive of Li Auto, as its legal representative. Located in China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone, the company’s business scope focuses precisely on core chip sectors, including technical services, technology development, IC chip design and related services, as well as sales of integrated circuit chips and products. Its business portfolio fully covers the whole chain of chip R&D, design, implementation and sales, which closely matches the R&D requirements for core hardware of intelligent vehicles.
(Reprinted from https://news.eccn.com/）