Source: NIO

NIO has begun external technology licensing of its in-house autonomous driving chip, the Shenji NX9031, according to the LatePost November 19 reports.

The transaction marks the first time the company has authorized the use of its 5nm automotive-grade platform to another chipmaker, initiating a new commercial path for one of its largest R&D undertakings.

The NX9031 project began in 2021 with a team of more than 600 engineers covering front-end design, back-end design, validation, and testing.

NIO CEO William Li said the program’s total investment equaled the cost of building 1,000 battery-swap stations, indicating spending in the tens of billions of CNY. At an estimated CNY 1.5–3 million (c. $211,000–422,000) per station, the cumulative investment reaches well above CNY 10 billion (c. $1.4 billion).

Contract value varies significantly by licensing scope, with single IP licenses typically priced in the several-million-USD range, while full system-on-chip licensing can reach the hundreds-of-millions-CNY level. The unnamed partner is an automotive chip company securing early access to NIO’s internally developed compute architecture.

The NX9031 adopts a 5nm automotive-grade manufacturing process and delivers approximately four times the computing power of NVIDIA’s Orin-X platform. NIO reports that a single NX9031 replaces four Orin-X units.

Source: NIO

The chip integrates more than 50 billion transistors, a 32-core big-little CPU design, LPDDR5X memory operating at 8,533 Mbps, and a high-dynamic-range ISP capable of 6.5G Pixel/s. Processing latency is below 5 ms. Hardware and the underlying software stack were developed in-house.

NIO stated in May that the NX9031 completed three years of development and testing, with several performance metrics surpassing commonly used industry chips. The platform entered mass production months ahead of NVIDIA’s upcoming Thor-U autonomous-driving SoC. It is currently deployed in the NIO ET9, the 2025 ES6, and the 2025 EC6.

The chip is managed under Anhui Shenji Technology Co., Ltd., a NIO subsidiary created in June to oversee design, production, and external licensing.

On November 14, the unit formed a joint venture—Chongqing Chuangyuan Zhihang Technology Co., Ltd.—with Aixin Yuanzhi Semiconductor (Chongqing) and OmniVision. The venture has registered capital of 100 million CNY (c. $14.1 million), with Aixin Yuanzhi holding a 36.4% stake.

Aixin Yuanzhi, founded in 2019, originally focused on AI vision chips. It entered the automotive-chip segment in 2023 through an acquisition and completed a Series C raise exceeding 1 billion CNY in April.

The company currently produces the M55 and M76 chips, which target basic driver-assistance functions and compete with Horizon Robotics’ Journey 2 and Journey 3 series. Its high-end city-NOA-level chip remains in development.

Despite the NX9031’s compute density, NIO continues to face external scrutiny regarding the real-world performance of its smart-driving system, as compute capability does not directly translate to on-road behavior.

The company has signaled strong cost-management measures in 2024 as it works toward achieving fourth-quarter profitability. The licensing program adds a new revenue stream at a time when the company is searching for business lines beyond vehicle sales.

Li said in March at the China Electric Vehicle 100 Forum that NIO’s chips and operating systems would be open to third-party customers, stating that companies seeking high-performance platforms could “look to NIO.”

The shift toward external licensing suggests the company is building a broader semiconductor strategy beyond its own vehicle lineup, raising the question of how widely the NX9031 platform could be adopted by Chinese smart-driving suppliers as they scale urban-NOA systems.

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