Xiaomi's Washington Opening and a 3-Nanometer Chip Land in the Same Week
Published on 09/18/2026 at 21:50 | Editorial boerse-global.de
Beijing is weighing whether to hand Xiaomi a seat at the top table of Sino-American diplomacy. According to people familiar with the planning, the electronics-to-EV group is among the candidates for a business delegation that would accompany President Xi Jinping on a proposed visit to Washington — a list that also takes in BYD, CATL, Gotion, Hisense, Wanxiang and the Bank of China.
Formal invitations are expected to go out within days, and US visas for the participants are viewed as likely to be granted. The trip itself, however, hinges on a meeting between US Treasury Secretary Bessent and Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng over the weekend. Washington's agenda is expected to cover a Board of Trade agreement, fresh export licences for rare earths, and an extension of the trade pact struck in South Korea in October.
The backdrop is anything but relaxed. American tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles stand at 100%, and from model year 2027 a ban on connected passenger cars from Chinese manufacturers is set to take effect. CATL has sat on a Pentagon list since January 2025, BYD since June 2026. Legal skirmishes add to the friction: Gotion is suing over a blocked plant in Michigan, while Wanxiang paid more than USD 53 million to settle a US Department of Justice case.
That Xiaomi's name appears at all in this company says something about how far the group has travelled beyond smartphones. Its auto arm and chip programme have turned it into a strategically relevant player in the broader contest between the two powers.
An EV milestone and a 3nm breakthrough
The operational news flow has not paused for the diplomacy. Cumulative vehicle deliveries passed the 800,000 mark on Thursday, roughly 29 months after the SU7 launched in April 2024. The most recent 100,000 units took only about three and a half months to shift, a pace that speaks to how quickly the car business has scaled.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Xiaomi?
On the semiconductor front, Xiaomi unveiled the Xring D100, which it describes as China's first smart-driving chip built on a 3-nanometer process, featuring a 20-core CPU and a 16-core NPU. Commercial deployment is targeted for 2027. Add the Xring O3 mobile SoC already fitted in the Xiaomi 18 Fold and the O100 AI accelerator slated for 2027, and the group's chip investments since the programme was restarted total more than 21 billion yuan, shouldered by some 3,000 specialists.
The stated goal is independence from outside suppliers such as Qualcomm and MediaTek, though concrete technical specifications have yet to be disclosed.
Reinforcement learning, live on a dashboard
Xiaomi's in-house MiMo team has taken the unusual step of letting the public watch a reinforcement-learning run in real time since Thursday. A dashboard exposes reward curves, rollout counts and running compute costs for two unreleased models, MiMo-V2.6-Pro and MiMo-V2.6-Flash. Team lead Luo Fuli describes it as a roughly six-month investigation into scaling the method since the previous MiMo-V2.5 version. Final specifications, pricing and interfaces remain outstanding.
On the product side, early benchmark figures have surfaced for the upcoming 18 Pro Max flagship, pointing to Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chip and a secondary display on the rear. For Germany, a distribution network spanning eight major retail partners has already been agreed.
The market shrugs
None of this has moved the stock much. The shares changed hands at EUR 2.91, barely above the previous close of EUR 2.90. That leaves the equity about 56% below its 52-week high of EUR 6.54 set last September, and roughly 4% under its 50-day moving average. Year-to-date the decline runs to 32%.
Investors appear to be treating both the political and technological catalysts with caution for now. The next hard data point comes with quarterly results scheduled for 24 November. Until then, Xiaomi's possible role in the orbit of the Xi visit looks like the factor most capable of shifting the valuation beyond the day-to-day of the operating business — assuming, of course, the invitation actually arrives.
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