CXMT steps in, XHEART has secured a total of 5 billion yuan in cumulative financing | 36Kr Exclusive

36Kr has learned from multiple industry insiders that XHEART, a physical AI computing power chip company, recently completed its strategic round of financing. In this round, Groupe Renault made its first investment in the company, Chery Automobile increased its existing stake, and CXMT Technology, China's leading storage enterprise, also participated in the financing.

It is reported that XHEART's total historical financing amount has reached about 50 billion yuan.

Among the investors in this round, Groupe Renault is a leading European automaker with annual sales exceeding 2 million units last year. Chery Group is a local state-owned enterprise based in Wuhu, whose annual sales have remained at the level of millions of units for years. CXMT Technology is a giant in the domestic storage industry, and this investment marks a rare case where it has backed an automotive-focused chip company.

XHEART is positioned as a dedicated chip designer for large model demands, providing hardware support for physical AI applications including autonomous driving and robotics.

At present, XHEART's core product is the X7, which targets the L2++ urban intelligent assisted driving and L3/L4 autonomous driving markets, with its design benchmarking mature assisted driving chips in the industry.

SAIC Volkswagen ID.ERA 9X is the first mass production vehicle equipped with the X7 chip. Later, the X7 was successively installed on MG and Roewe models under SAIC, Cadillac models under General Motors, as well as some new energy and fuel vehicle models under Chery. An industry insider told 36Kr that the highlight of this chip is that the team conducted in-depth cooperation with the Momenta team at the planning and design stage, embedding its understanding of algorithms into the chip architecture. This makes the chip's resource allocation more targeted, and it does not need to reserve redundant designs for all possible scenarios like other Tier 2 chip suppliers, so that the X7 chip can balance indicators including performance, power consumption and yield rate.

At present, both autonomous driving models and embodied robot models have growing parameters, with the parameter size of autonomous driving models expanding from the level of millions to billions. XHEART is also developing its next-generation products to respond to this trend.

Behind XHEART's products is a highly capable team. Many of XHEART's management members are senior practitioners in the chip industry.

Another competitive advantage of XHEART lies in its cooperative ecosystem.

Momenta, a leading domestic autonomous driving algorithm company, and QNX, an operating system developer, are both in-depth partners of XHEART. Momenta is one of the earliest domestic companies to focus on L2 autonomous driving. Cao Xudong, founder of Momenta, once said in an interview with 36Kr that it usually takes 3 years of communication to cooperate with Chinese automakers, and more than 5 years for international automakers. This early mover advantage has allowed Momenta to accumulate considerable strength in customer resources.

Up to now, Momenta's customers have covered more than 20 automakers around the world. On the eve of Momenta's listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the number of vehicles equipped with its software had reached 1 million units. The in-depth cooperation with Momenta will undoubtedly help XHEART expand its shipment scale.

The new investors introduced by XHEART in this round will also provide strong support for the company's future development.

The domestic market has become a red ocean with extremely fierce competition. Both automakers and suppliers have to plan for overseas expansion if they want to build a second growth curve. As a leading enterprise deeply rooted in the European market, Groupe Renault, and Chery, a pioneer of Chinese independent brands going global, the equity tie between XHEART and the two parties is likely to be a key step for the chip company on its path of international expansion.

Participation of CXMT Technology in this round of financing is also the highlight of this deal.

The skyrocketing memory price was a black swan event in the manufacturing industry this year, which put forward higher requirements for the cost control capability of upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain. An industry insider told 36Kr that Qualcomm, the overseas leading chip giant, beat domestic chip suppliers to win the designated order from leading new energy automaker Leapmotor, precisely because it signed an agreement with Micron in advance to get memory at a lower quotation, making its chips more cost competitive.

By introducing CXMT Technology as its shareholder, XHEART is expected to gain advantages in memory quotation and supply chain stability.

On the other hand, more and more players are pouring into the physical AI chip field.

In recent years, a major trend in the AI chip industry is that NIO, Li Auto and Xpeng, several domestic new energy automakers, have spun off their self-developed chip businesses to seek external financing and open up external customers.

Take Xpeng's Turing chip as an example, it has been installed on Volkswagen's models. Volkswagen is a globally recognized leading international automaker, with global new car deliveries exceeding 8 million units last year. The giant automaker has long been a shareholder of Xpeng, which means other chip manufacturers have to make greater efforts to enter Volkswagen's supply chain.

Admittedly, compared with third-party chip suppliers, chip companies spun off from automakers face greater difficulty in winning orders from other competing automakers. But for the embodied intelligence industry with huge market potential, third-party chip suppliers and the chip subsidiaries of automakers are on the same starting line.

Moreover, these new energy automakers are also competing in the field of assisted driving software. Enterprises that are familiar with algorithms and software tend to have more reasonable chip architecture design. In addition, the total number of vehicles equipped with automotive chips has reached the level of millions, which means that the chip subsidiaries of automakers have no less engineering experience than third-party chip companies.

In the broad physical AI track, XHEART has its own advantages as well as facing challenges, but the company has obviously gained the confidence to face the competition directly.

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