The company, founded eight years ago, is hiring positions in Singapore to develop power modules made of silicon carbide (SiC), an electrical component that uses SiC semiconductors in switching, according to the company’s LinkedIn hiring ads posted yesterday.
Staffing includes the hiring of a CEO, who will be responsible for Li Auto’s R&D center in the city-state and formulating power semiconductor product and generation roadmaps for the company.
The hiring in Singapore is just a small fraction of the team of 160 or so people that Li Auto has assembled to paint car chips, according to Chinese tech news blog LatePost. The head of the company’s semiconductor business is reportedly its generation leader, Yan Xie. , whose background is typically in software engineering at Chinese giants like Huawei and Alibaba.
TechCrunch has contacted Li Auto for comment on the story.
Led through Internet entrepreneurs, Li Auto, Nio and
Among them, Li Auto stood out for its sales figures. In the third quarter, the Beijing-based automaker shipped more than 100,000 vehicles, more than double Xpeng’s record of 40,000 in the same period. (Nio did not announce its third-quarter results, however, in the second quarter it delivered about 23,500 vehicles. )
Manufacturing disruptions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the importance of origin chain stability for automakers around the world, and this is true for Chinese EV corporations that rely on force semiconductors for motor control and inference chips for complex assisted driving. Parent topic. Point of sale for domestic consumers.
These corporations are also wary of potential chip-related sanctions as relations between China and the United States continue to deteriorate. The vast area of language models has already taken a hit after Biden’s leadership limited Nvidia’s high-end AI chips to China.
While China has its own responses to Nvidia chips, such as Black Sesame and Horizon Robotics, Li Auto, Xpeng and Nio have committed investments to manufacture their own chips, following in the footsteps of their American counterpart Tesla.
In September, for example, Nio unveiled its first proprietary system-on-a-chip (SoC) for lidar. In 2021, Xpeng’s then-head of autonomous vehicles, Xinzhou Wu, hinted that the company could be powered by AV chips. Wu, a Qualcomm veteran, recently left Xpeng for a senior role at Nvidia, a move that was seen as an attempt by the semiconductor giant to catch up in the automotive chip-making game.
Tesla rival Xpeng’s head of self-driving is stepping down, reportedly joining Nvidia