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According to a report by Chinese media outlet LatePost, Li Auto is planning to establish a chip research and development office in Hong Kong and is recruiting AI chip architects. This office is positioned as an international technology exchange center, under the auspices of the Li Auto Chip Preliminary Research Department. The positions currently open roughly correspond to the positions of technical experts/senior experts at leading domestic internet companies, with a team size expected to be around 10 people.
A person close to Li Auto said that the chip pre-research department belongs to the system operations department and is mainly responsible for software R&D related to intelligent driving chips. “The people that the pre-research team wants are all elites.”
In addition, Li Auto‘s official website shows that it is recruiting strategic investors in Hong Kong related to chips and training clusters. It requires candidates to have 4 years or more of experience in Taiwan’s chip industry companies, understand the latest changes in chip industry design technology, advanced processes, equipment, etc., and have the ability to complete chip industry research, project research, and investment work.
It is unclear why Li Auto chose to set up a chip R&D office in Hong Kong. In November last year, Li Auto set up a chip R&D office in Singapore. In addition to the aforementioned locations, Li Auto‘s chip R&D team is also located in Beijing, Shanghai, and Silicon Valley in the United States, with a total of about 200 people.
Li Auto is simultaneously developing two types of chips: an AI inference chip for intelligent driving scenarios and a SiC power chip for motor controllers. Among them, the Li Auto intelligent driving AI inference chip adopts an architecture similar to Tesla’s Hardware 5.0, with about 40 billion transistors, and has been sent to TSMC for wafer production.
In the chip industry, “wafer production” refers to trial production, which means that after the R&D team has designed the circuit, a small number of chips are produced for testing, to verify whether each process step is feasible and whether the chip has the corresponding design function.
A person in the chip industry revealed to LatePost that chip wafer production involves three stages: design file delivery, production, and testing. Production and testing each require 1 to 2 months. If the sample chips produced by the foundry can pass the basic function test by Li Auto‘s R&D personnel, it means that the wafer production is successful; if the sample chips fail the test, Li Auto needs to use software to repair the chip function, or modify the design diagram and re-produce the wafer.
It is understood that the results of the wafer production of Li Auto‘s intelligent driving car-side inference chip are expected in the fourth quarter of this year, and mass production is expected in 2026.
As of press time, Li Auto‘s official response has not been given.
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