How Xiaomi’s push into AI, chips and EVs is future-proofing its hardware empire

Source: Tech - South China Morning Post ↗

Xiaomi committed more than 60 billion yuan ($8.8 billion) to AI investments over the next three years, and its newly released MiMo-V2.5-Pro model was ranked the top open-source system for agentic capabilities by benchmark platform Artificial Analysis. The model placed second and third in overall intelligence and coding among open-source systems, behind DeepSeek and Moonshot AI.

Why it matters

The $8.8 billion line is the one that matters for operators. Xiaomi is the only Chinese consumer hardware company shipping at scale across smartphones, smart home, and EVs (SU7 deliveries are real), and it is now funding an in-house frontier model program to sit underneath all of it. That changes the procurement calculus for anyone building agentic features on Qwen or DeepSeek: a vertically integrated competitor with its own silicon roadmap, its own vehicles, and its own distribution can subsidize the model layer indefinitely.

The quieter read is what MiMo signals about the open-source tier in China. DeepSeek, Moonshot, and now Xiaomi are clustered at the top of the agentic benchmarks, all open-weight, all Chinese. For Western robotics and AV teams building on open models, the dependency map is consolidating onto Chinese labs faster than the export-control conversation has caught up to. The interesting question for 2026 is whether Xiaomi ties MiMo directly into the SU7 and YU7 cabin stack, which would be the first time a frontier open model ships as standard equipment in a car.

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