Axera Unveils AX8860 Edge AI Chip with High Performance and Lower Cost

Axera officially launched the AX8860 series of high-performance edge AI chips on October 13, 2026, offering up to 256 TOPS of hybrid-precision computing power and 128GB of LPDDR5X memory. The chip is designed to deploy large language models on edge and terminal devices while undercutting competing hardware prices. This release provides a cost-effective alternative for deploying edge large language models, challenging established hardware like NVIDIA's DGX Spark. It demonstrates the rapid maturation of domestic edge AI semiconductor capabilities for localized enterprise workloads. The 6nm AX8860 features 16 Arm Cortex-A55 cores and a proprietary NPU supporting native FP4, paired with a 256-bit memory bus delivering 273 GB/s of bandwidth. Benchmarks show it outperforms NVIDIA's DGX Spark by 25% in prefill speed and 30% in decode speed on the Qwen 27B model, while retailing at roughly half the price.