Li Auto's Chip Subsidiary Maxunite Secures 1.625 Billion RMB in Series A Funding
Li Auto's chip subsidiary, Maxunite, has completed a 1.625 billion RMB Series A funding round, valuing the company at up to 17.1 billion RMB. This comes following the successful mass production and deployment of its self-developed 5nm AI chip, the Maxunite M100. This funding and technological milestone highlights the growing trend of electric vehicle makers pursuing vertical integration to secure custom silicon for advanced autonomous driving. By controlling the stack from chip architecture to vehicle delivery, Li Auto reduces reliance on external suppliers and strengthens its competitive edge in AI capabilities. The Maxunite M100 chip is built on a 5nm automotive-grade process using a dynamic dataflow architecture, delivering 1,280 TOPS of computing power and a peak bandwidth of 273GB/s. Following this funding round, in which Li Auto invested 1亿元 (1 billion RMB) directly, the automaker retains a 74.01% controlling stake in Maxunite.
## BACKGROUND
As electric vehicles become increasingly software-defined, automakers are turning to custom silicon like domain-specific AI accelerators to handle massive real-time sensor data for autonomous driving. Technologies like dynamic dataflow architectures represent a paradigm shift from traditional instruction-driven processing, optimizing computational efficiency and alleviating memory bottlenecks for heavy AI workloads.