NIO's chip subsidiary signs over 2.2 billion yuan in Series A equity financing agreement: valuation close to 10 billion yuan, Hefei Guotou and others participate

NIO’s subsidiary chip company’s post-investment valuation reaches nearly 10 billion yuan.

On February 26, NIO announced that its chip subsidiary, Anhui Shenji Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as “Anhui Shenji”), completed its Series A equity financing agreement, raising over 2.2 billion yuan, with a post-investment valuation close to 10 billion yuan. This round of financing attracted multiple industry capital and leading industry institutions, including Hefei Guotou, Hefei Haiheng, IDG Capital, SMIC Juyuan, and Yuanhe Puhua.

NIO stated that this financing will help Shenji continuously develop and promote high-end, highly competitive chip products, supporting NIO’s long-term layout in autonomous driving, embodied intelligence, and other fields.

Tianyancha shows that Anhui Shenji was established on June 17, 2025, as a member of NIO China, located in Hefei, Anhui Province. It is mainly engaged in technology promotion and application services. The controlling shareholder is NIO Automotive Technology (Anhui) Co., Ltd., holding 86.27%. The legal representative is Bai Jian, who also serves as director and general manager of the company. Li Bin is the chairman and director.

NIO mentioned that Anhui Shenji is the first domestic company to develop 5nm automotive-grade chips and to achieve large-scale commercial use. The “Shenji NX9031” chip has shipped over 150,000 units since production began in 2024 and has been successfully deployed across NIO’s entire vehicle lineup.

After this round of financing, Shenji will also launch ultra-high-performance chips for the next-generation intelligent driving and several other chips in different fields. The company’s initial orders mainly come from NIO, but it is also actively expanding into emerging businesses such as embodied robots and Agent reasoning, providing complete chip and smart hardware solutions for various clients in the AGI era.

NIO’s in-house chip development began in 2021, with the core goal of reducing dependence on external chip suppliers, achieving deep integration of intelligent driving hardware and software, and lowering costs.

According to NIO founder Li Bin, NIO decided in 2021 to start its own intelligent driving chip project, officially establishing the “Shenji NX9031.” In 2021, amid a global chip shortage, the automotive supply chain’s fragility was exposed. Additionally, as intelligentization advanced, the gap between general-purpose chips and automakers’ self-developed algorithms became more apparent.

At NIO Day 2023, Li Bin officially announced the release of NIO’s first self-developed intelligent driving chip, “Shenji NX9031,” confirming it was manufactured with 5nm automotive-grade process technology. At NIO Innovation Day 2024, NIO officially announced the successful tape-out of the chip, which then entered mass production and was gradually equipped on NIO NT3.0 platform models and all facelift models.

Li Bin has repeatedly stated that self-developed chips have significantly reduced vehicle manufacturing costs.

In-vehicle chips are the “brain” of smart vehicles, directly determining the performance ceiling of intelligent driving and smart cockpits. Previously, the high-end automotive chip market was long dominated by international giants like NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Mobileye. Domestic automakers mostly relied on general-purpose chips, facing issues such as unstable supply chains, high costs, and difficulties in hardware-software integration and technological iteration.

As smart vehicles enter the second half of their intelligentization, achieving independent control of core chips has become a key competitive advantage for automakers. Besides NIO, many leading domestic automakers are also actively developing and manufacturing their own chips.

For example, BYD started early in chip self-research, focusing on intelligent driving and automotive-grade general-purpose chips; XPeng’s self-developed Turing AI chip has been officially mass-produced and equipped in vehicles since Q2 2025; Changan Auto has explicitly stated in the “Beidou Tianshu 2.0” plan that it will increase investment in chip self-research to achieve autonomous control of core chips.

(Source: The Paper)