Xiaomi unveils Kunlun architecture and picks NVIDIA's Thor for its new SUVs

Xiaomi presented its “Kunlun” vehicle architecture and opened pre-sales of the Sky Nomad N90 Max and N70 Max, range-extended SUVs priced from RMB 259,900, according to Chinese media reports.

The architecture bundles three subsystems — a flat-floor vehicle platform, a range-extension powertrain, and a full-domain safety structure. The assisted-driving choice drew the most attention: Xiaomi HAD runs its XLA cognitive model on a 700-TOPS NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor chip, standard across both models, rather than on in-house silicon of the kind BYD, NIO and XPeng have poured billions into. Supplier lists reported by Gasgoo credit Bosch for the braking system and Hesai and RoboSense for lidar; neither cited source names a supplier.

While rivals argue that owning the chip is owning the destiny, Xiaomi — a company that designs smartphone silicon — chose to buy its automotive compute. The divergence keeps the build-versus-buy question genuinely open.