When Xiaomi debuted its first self-developed flagship chip, the Xuanjie O1, back in May 2025, the launch felt almost tentative. The debut phone, the Xiaomi 15S Pro, was billed as a commemorative edition and largely reused the Xiaomi 15 Pro’s design rather than anchoring a true flagship. It read like a company testing the waters, likely keeping the price low to get more people to actually try the chip before committing further.
Fast forward to this week’s launch event, and the tone has completely flipped. According to a report by 36Kr, Xiaomi’s newest self-developed chip, the Xuanjie O3 (referred to as the Xring O3 in some earlier coverage), headlines a full product matrix that includes the Xiaomi 18 Fold and the Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro Max, alongside a lineup of new Pengcheng electric vehicles.
Debuting a Flagship Chip Inside a Foldable Is a Deliberate Flex
The choice of device matters here as much as the chip itself. Foldables are typically the most performance-conservative devices in any manufacturer’s lineup, thanks to their thin, dual-hinge builds leaving little room for heat dissipation. The Xiaomi 18 Fold is about 5mm thick and roughly the size of a passport when folded, which makes it an unusually demanding place to introduce a chip Xiaomi wants people to take seriously.
That’s arguably the point. By putting the Xuanjie O3 into its most thermally constrained device first, without a built-in cooling fan, Xiaomi is making an implicit claim: the chip doesn’t need the kind of active cooling hardware some performance-focused phones rely on to hit strong benchmark numbers. There’s also a naming detail worth noting. Calling this phone the Xiaomi 18 Fold, rather than continuing the Mix Fold line as a Mix Fold 5, hints that Xiaomi may be planning to update its foldables on a faster cadence going forward, closer to its main numbered flagship series.
Putting the Xuanjie O3 in what will likely be the highest-positioned model in the Xiaomi 18 series, while leaked reports suggest other models in the same series will run new flagship Qualcomm and MediaTek chips instead, sends a clear message. Xiaomi isn’t hedging anymore. It’s putting its own silicon up against the best chips on the market in the same product generation, rather than just claiming leadership from the sidelines.
The Tablet Angle Looks Like It’s Really About PCs
The Xuanjie O3 isn’t confined to phones. It also powers the new Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro Max, and the ambitions attached to that tablet go well beyond typical Android tablet territory.
The Pad 9 Pro Max reportedly includes something Xiaomi calls a “PC Engine,” capable of running select Linux desktop software for full office work, CAD editing, and video editing, tasks Android tablets have traditionally struggled to handle natively. It also supports DisplayPort input over USB-C, letting it function as a portable monitor for PCs, phones, or game consoles, without the resolution loss or latency that comes with wireless screen mirroring.
Perhaps the clearest signal of intent: during the tablet’s performance comparisons at the launch event, Xiaomi didn’t benchmark it against other tablets. It benchmarked it against laptops, with results reportedly putting the Xuanjie O3 close to Apple’s M5 chip in a large-tablet form factor. Add in support for a premium floating keyboard accessory and compatibility with professional drawing and 3D modeling peripherals, and it’s hard not to read this as Xiaomi laying groundwork for an eventual Xuanjie-powered computer down the line, even if nothing official has been said about one yet.
Four New EVs, and a Few Details That Say More Than the Sales Numbers Will
Rounding out the event, Xiaomi introduced four new Pengcheng vehicles: the N70 Pro, N70 Max, N90 Max, and a N90 Max Explorer Edition. The N70 Max is effectively a slightly smaller take on the N90 Max, keeping the same generous cabin space and home-appliance-inspired features, think built-in refrigerator, TV, and sizable seating, that Xiaomi’s EVs have leaned into from the start.
Two details stand out beyond the spec sheet. First, the climate control, refrigerator, and TV components reportedly draw directly on technology from Xiaomi’s home appliance division, rather than being sourced from third-party automotive suppliers. Second, the top trim’s 25-speaker, 7.1.4 surround sound system was developed entirely in-house, with no audio-brand co-branding attached to it at all. Both point to the same underlying story: Xiaomi’s product divisions, phones, chips, appliances, and cars, increasingly function as one coordinated engineering effort rather than separate teams building in isolation.
The N90 Max Explorer Edition, meanwhile, isn’t likely to be a high-volume seller. Its existence says something else: Xiaomi now has enough headroom, financially and organizationally, to greenlight a car built more for ambition and enthusiasm than for hitting a sales target, and actually bring it to market instead of leaving it as a concept.
The Bigger Pattern Here
Tracing the Xuanjie chip’s path from a cautious, low-priced trial run in 2025 to a direct, no-hedging confrontation with top-tier competitors in 2026 says a lot about what’s changed inside Xiaomi over roughly eighteen months. Self-developed silicon isn’t something a company can rush. It takes sustained investment and repeated iteration to close a performance and efficiency gap against established chipmakers.
What this launch event suggests is that Xiaomi has stopped treating that gap as something to work around cautiously, and started treating it as one it’s genuinely closing.
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