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[Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

2026 WIC Distinguished Contribution Award

Innovation Breakthrough award-winning enterprise: Xiaomi Corporation

The vitality of an innovation depends not only on the technology itself, but also on whether it can leave the laboratory and enter products, become part of everyday life and industry. From in-house chips to operating systems, and from large models to robotics, Xiaomi is working to open up an innovation path that runs from foundational technologies to a wide range of scenarios: Letting different technologies support one another, letting different devices evolve in coordination, and letting R&D results form collaborative innovation across the "Human × Car × Home" ecosystem. In November, Xiaomi Corporation received the WIC Distinguished Contribution Award. Behind that recognition is a Chinese technology company's long-term practice of moving from individual technology breakthroughs to systematic innovation.

Systematic innovation first requires a long-term commitment. Xiaomi has consistently made technological innovation its core development strategy and upheld the development philosophy of "technology as our foundation". From 2021 to 2025, Xiaomi's total R&D investment hit 105.5 billion yuan ($15.85 billion). Over the next five years, it plans to invest more than 200 billion yuan ($30.06 billion), with a focus on frontier fields such as large models, embodied AI and intelligent manufacturing. As of June 30, 2026, Xiaomi had more than 25,000 R&D personnel, 47 percent of its total workforce, and had been granted more than 47,000 patents worldwide. What sustained investment builds is not only the competitiveness of a single product, but also the R&D capability to keep pushing deeper into foundational technologies.

Artificial intelligence has become an increasingly active connective force in the technology stack. Since releasing MiMo, its first open-source large model, Xiaomi has gradually built a model matrix covering language, multimodality, speech and embodied AI. Through full open-sourcing and MIT commercial licensing, Xiaomi has also opened its model capabilities to a wider community of developers and industry partners. Since their launch, call volume for the MiMo V2.6 and V2.5 series has continued to rise. According to OpenRouter data, MiMo series models are among the most-called models in the world and have been widely adopted by developers worldwide. Large models are therefore no longer just laboratory results, but an important link connecting technology R&D, device experiences and industry applications.

If large models make the entire ecosystem smarter, chips and operating systems together underpin the capabilities on which the ecosystem runs. After more than a decade of sustained effort, Xiaomi successfully developed the XRING O1 flagship chip, becoming the first company in the Chinese mainland and the fourth in the world to release a 3nm flagship smartphone chipset. In August 2026, three chips from the new XRING family were launched. The XRING O3 AI flagship SoC, with AI acceleration hardware built into every module , is the industry's first flagship SoC to surpass 5 million points on AnTuTu Benchmark. Meanwhile, Xiaomi HyperOS is human-centric and connects phones, tablets, watches, TVs, smart home devices and cars through a unified, converged kernel architecture, linking more than 1 billion devices.

As the XRING series, HyperOS and MiMo large models converge, chips, operating systems and AI are moving from separate breakthroughs toward mutual enablement. The significance lies not merely in adding more proprietary technologies, but in driving the "Human × Car × Home" ecosystem from connecting devices toward coordinating computing power, intelligent services and application scenarios.

Such changes must ultimately be tested by user experience. With the support of large models, Xiaomi HyperAI has evolved from a voice assistant that executes simple commands into an agent that can understand complex semantics and carry out multi-step tasks. Home agents can coordinate whole-home devices based on natural language and everyday scenarios, while in-car intelligent interaction extends these capabilities into mobility. When devices begin to understand needs and coordinate proactively, technological innovation no longer stays at the level of specifications and configurations, but becomes a more natural and more continuous intelligent living experience.

Innovation is also flowing into intelligent manufacturing. At Xiaomi's automobile factory, humanoid robots have moved beyond the laboratory and are performing continuous three-hour autonomous operations in real automotive workstations, achieving a 90.2 percent nut installation success rate while meeting production line takt-time requirements. A real production line is both an application scenario for embodied AI and a proving ground for technology iteration: robots take part in production, production data feeds back into R&D, and manufacturing needs continue to drive technology optimization, forming an innovation loop of "R&D – application – validation – evolution".

Building on its self-developed Hyper Intelligent Manufacturing Platform, Xiaomi has further built a matrix of smart factories covering smartphones, automobiles and home appliances, and has opened related capabilities to industrial chain partners. The platform now connects more than 200 manufacturers. From using intelligent technology to make products, to using self-developed robots to transform factories, and then to exporting manufacturing capabilities to the industrial chain, Xiaomi's innovations are moving beyond the company toward broader industrial collaboration.

Today, Xiaomi's business covers more than 100 countries and regions, its smartphone business remains among the world's top three, and its AIoT platform connects more than 1.16 billion devices. From a single chip and an operating system to AI models and industrial robots, and onward to an extensive ecosystem connecting personal life, smart mobility and the home, what Xiaomi is exploring not only the expansion of technological boundaries, but also how innovation can be rapidly translated, continuously iterated, and turned into real value.

Let technology create value through coordination, and let innovation continue to grow through real-world applications. Xiaomi's full-stack in-house R&D practice provides evolving technological support for the "Human × Car × Home" ecosystem and offers a new practical model for the integrated development of internet technology companies and the real economy.