Shaoqing Ren, vice president, autonomous driving development, at Nio speaks about the electric company’s 5nm chip at its tech day in Shanghai on July 27, 2024.
CNBC | Evelyn Cheng
BEIJING — Chinese electric car companies that are already engaged in an intense price war are turning up the heat on another front: Chip-powered tech features such as the driver-assist function.
Nio and Xpeng have announced that their in-house designed auto chips are ready for production. So far, many of the major Chinese electric car makers have relied on Nvidia chips, with the company’s automotive chips business over the past few years bringing in more than $300 million in revenue a quarter.
“It’s hard to point to your product being superior when your competitors use the exact same silicon to power their infotainment and intelligent driving systems,” said Tu Le, founder of consulting firm Sino Auto Insights, explaining why EV makers are turning to in-house chips.
Le said he expected Tesla and Chinese electric car startups to compete on designing their own chips, while traditional automakers will likely still rely on Nvidia and Qualcomm “for the foreseeable future.”
Nvidia reported a 37% year-on-year increase in automotive segment revenue to $346 million in the latest quarter.
“Automotive was a key growth driver for the quarter as every auto maker developing autonomous vehicle technology is using NVIDIA in their Data Centers,” company management said on an earnings call, according to a FactSet transcript.
In 2019, Tesla reportedly shifted from Nvidia to its own chip for advanced driver-assist functions.
By designing their own chips, Chinese automakers can customize features, as well as reduce supply chain risk from geopolitical tensions, Liu said.
Liu does not expect significant impact to Nvidia in the short-term, however, as Chinese automakers will likely test new tech in small batches in the higher-end of the market.
Leveraging latest tech
Nio in late July said it had finished designing an automotive-grade chip, the NX9031, that uses a highly advanced 5 nanometer production technology.
“It is the first time that the five-nanometer process technology has been used in the Chinese automotive industry,” said Florence Zhang, consulting director at China Insights Consultancy, according to a CNBC translation of her Mandarin-language remarks. “It has broken through the bottleneck of domestic intelligent driving chip research and development.”
Nio, which had teased the chip in December, plans to use it in the high-end ET9 sedan, set for delivery in 2025.
The 5 nanometers technology is the most advanced one for autos because the 3 nanometer tech is mostly used for smartphone, personal computer and artificial intelligence-related applications, CLSA analyst Jason Tsang, said following the Nio chip announcement.
Xpeng at its event on Tuesday did not disclose the nanometer technology it was using for its Turing chip. The company‘s driver-assist technology is widely considered one of the best currently available in China.
While Xpeng revealed its chip on Tuesday, Brian Gu, Xpeng president, emphasized in a CNBC interview the day before that his company will primarily partner with Nvidia for chips.
The two companies have a close relationship, and Xpeng’s former head of autonomous driving joined Nvidia last year.
Giants in China’s electric car industry are also recognizing the importance of chips for autos.
If batteries were the foundation for the first phase of electric car development, semiconductors are the basis for the industry’s second phase, as it focuses on smart connected vehicles, BYD‘s founder, Wang Chuanfu, said in April at a press conference held by Chinese driver-assist chip company Horizon Robotics.
Wang said more than 1 million BYD vehicles use Horizon Robotics chips.
U.S. restrictions on Nvidia chip sales to China haven’t directly affected automakers since the cars haven’t required the most advanced semiconductor technology so far.
But with increasing focus on driver-assist tech, which relies more on artificial intelligence — a segment at the center of U.S.-China tech competition — Chinese automakers are turning to in-house tech.
Looking ahead to the next decade, Xpeng Founder He Xiaopeng said Tuesday the company plans to become a global artificial intelligence car company.
When asked about the availability of computing power for training driver-assist tech, Xpeng’s Gu told reporters Monday that prior to the U.S. restrictions the company had been working with Alibaba Cloud. He claimed that access now probably gives Xpeng the largest cloud computing capacity among all car manufacturers in China.
Creating new tech and standards
Government incentives, from subsidies to support for building out a battery charging network, have helped electric cars take off in China, the world’s largest auto market.
In July, penetration of new energy vehicles, which includes battery-only and hybrid-powered cars, exceeded 50% of new passenger cars sold in China for the first time, according to industry data.
That scale means that companies involved in the country’s electric car development are also contributing to new standards on tech for cars, such as removing the need for a physical key to unlock the door. Instead, drivers can use a smartphone app.
How that app or device securely connects drivers to their cars is part of the forthcoming set of standards that the California-based Car Connectivity Consortium is working on, according to president Alysia Johnson.
A quarter of the organization’s members are based in China, including Nio, BYD, Zeekr and Huawei. Apple, Google and Samsung are also members, Johnson revealed.
She said the organization is looking to enable a driver of a Nio car that uses a Huawei phone to securely send the car “key” to a partner who uses an Apple phone and drives a Zeekr car, for example.
“Digital key tech is becoming a lot more accessible than people would think,” she said.
The Exchange Square Complex, which houses the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, on Feb. 26, 2025.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
BEIJING — Chinese companies are jumping at a window of opportunity to go public in Hong Kong as global investors start to return to the region, following the news of DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence breakthrough in late January.
It’s a level of excitement that has not been felt for more than three years, despite the overhang of U.S. trade tensions. Initial public offerings are a lucrative way for early investors in startups to exit and reap a return.
“Everyone is working so perfectly together. IPO candidates, the investor and the regulators,” said George Chan, global IPO leader at EY. “All these three parties are working so perfectly at this moment to actually cultivate a healthy Hong Kong IPO market.”
“The U.S. long-term fund has returned. It shows investors are getting more confident [about] China,” he said, adding that post-IPO performance has also been encouraging.
News of China-based DeepSeek’s claims to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT in reasoning capabilities at a lower cost — despite U.S. restrictions on Chinese access to advanced chips for training AI models — hit global tech stocks in late January, while spurring a rally in China. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index surged to three-year highs.
Six initial public offerings in Hong Kong raised more than 1 billion Hong Kong dollars ($130 million) in the first quarter — a jump from just one listing of that size in the year-ago period — according to KPMG.
In all, the consultancy said, Hong Kong saw 15 IPOs in all of the first quarter which raised 17.7 billion HKD — the best start to a year since 2021.
There’s still a long way to go before recovering to that level. Hong Kong saw 32 IPOs in the first quarter of 2021 that raised a whopping 132.7 billion HKD, according to KPMG.
The Hong Kong stock exchange has adjusted its listing rules in the interim, including ones that support companies already listed in mainland China to offer shares in Hong Kong.
In addition to CATL, other companies listed in mainland China — Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, Mabwell, Haitian Flavoring and Food, Fortior Tech and Sanhua Intelligent Controls — are “actively seeking Hong Kong listings,” said Tiger Brokers, an underwriter of many Chinese companies’ IPOs in the U.S. and Hong Kong.
“Chinese regulators are encouraging companies to list in Hong Kong to broaden financing channels and support the outbound merger and acquisition needs of Chinese enterprises,” the firm said.
Still not out of the woods
Back in the summer of 2021, the fallout over Chinese ride-hailing company Didi’s IPO in the U.S. prompted both countries’ regulators to scrutinize what was then a wave of Chinese companies listing in New York.
The major issues have since been resolved and Beijing has clarified rules for Chinese companies wanting to list outside the mainland. But the Trump administration indicated in its “America First Investment Policy” that it could increase scrutiny on U.S. capital flowing to China, on top of heightened tariffs.
The U.S. and China have yet to indicate when their two leaders might meet in an attempt to forge a deal. A surge of interest in AI and tech are also not yet enough to speed up a recovery in China’s economy.
“At this point in time, all we can see is the good indicators,” EY’s Chan said. But “there could be one single incident happening which could pretty much reverse the trend.”
“Things tend to have a pattern,” he said. “If things can keep on for three months, four months, it will likely continue for the rest of the year.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks to reporters outside the West Wing after doing a television interview on the North Lawn of the White House on March 13, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday the sell-off in the stock market is due more to a sharp pullback in the biggest technology stocks instead of the protectionist policies coming from the Trump administration.
“I’m trying to be Secretary of Treasury, not a market commentator. What I would point out is that especially the Nasdaq peaked on DeepSeek day so that’s a Mag 7 problem, not a MAGA problem,” Bessent said on Bloomberg TV Wednesday evening.
Bessent was referring to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, whose new language models sparked a rout in U.S. technology stocks in late January. The emergence of DeepSeek’s highly competitive and potentially much cheaper models stoked doubts about the billions that the big U.S. tech companies are spending on AI.
The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks — Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia — started selling off drastically, pulling the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite into correction territory. The tech-heavy benchmark is down about 13% from its record high reached on December 16.
However, the secretary downplayed the impact from President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs, which caught many investors off guard and fueled fears of a re-acceleration in inflation, slower economic growth and even a recession. Many investors have blamed the tariff rollout for driving the S&P 500 briefly into correction territory from its record reached in late February. Wall Street defines a correction as a drop of 10% from a recent high.
S&P 500, YTD
Trump signed an aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy at the White House Wednesday evening, slapping duties of at least 10% and even higher for some countries. The actions sparked a huge sell-off in the stock market overnight, with the S&P 500 futures declining nearly 4% and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding 1,100 points. The losses will likely but the S&P 500 back into correction territory in Thursday’s session.
“It’s going to be fine if we put the best economic conditions in place,” Bessent said in a separate interview on Fox Wednesday evening. “If you go back and look, the stock market actually peaked on the [DeepSeek] Chinese AI announcement. So a lot of what we have seen has been just an idiosyncratic tech sell-off.”
A Newsmax booth broadcasts as attendees try out the guns on display at the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention in Houston, Texas, U.S. May 29, 2022.
Callaghan O’hare | Reuters
Shares of conservative news channel Newsmax plunged more than 70% on Wednesday as its meteoric rise as a new public company proved to be short-lived.
The stock tumbled a whopping 72% in afternoon trading, following a 2,230% surge in Newsmax’s first two days of trading after debuting on the New York Stock Exchange. At one point, the rally gave the company a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion — surpassing the market cap of legacy media companies like Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp.
Newsmax was listed on the NYSE via a so-called Regulation A offering, instead of a traditional IPO. Such an offering allows small companies to raise capital without undergoing the full SEC registration process. The primary focus is to sell to retail investors, in this case It was sold to approximately 30,000 retail investors.
The public offering indeed garnered the attention from retail traders, some of whom touted the stock as the “New GME” in online chatrooms. GME refers to the meme stock GameStop, which made Wall Street history in 2021 by its speculative trading boom.
Newsmax has a small “float,” or shares available for trading. Less than 6% of Newsmax shares, or 7.5 million shares out of a total of 128 million fully diluted shares, are available for public trading.
The conservative TV news outlet has seen its ratings rise with the election of President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans — although it still falls behind the dominant Fox News. Overall, Newsmax ranks in the top 20 among cable network average viewership in both prime time and daytime, Nielsen said.