By PAN Tao

Kunlunxin, an AI chip company formerly owned by search engine giant Baidu, welcomed a new big-shot shareholder Monday. The new face is BYD, the world’s biggest EV and hybrid manufacturer.

Open data showed that the registered capital of Kunlunxin has increased from 17.68 million yuan (US$2.6 million) to 17.85 million yuan. The company is engaged in model design and computer animation, alongside economic and trade consulting. BYD now holds one-third of a percent of the company.

Kunlunxin has a massive back catalog of architecture, chip design, software systems and applications. Spun off from Baidu in 2011, the search engine remains Kunlunxin’s major shareholder with 71 percent of the entity.

The research outfit has taken two generations of general-purpose AI computing processors to market. The Kunlunxin XPU, the core architecture for general-purpose AI processors was released in 2017.

Kunlunxin closed its first independent financing round in 2021 which took its market valuation to around 13 billion yuan.

“Whoever wins the battle of AI chips will win the next lap of the EV race,” WANG Chuanfu, founder and CEO of BYD, said years ago.

In recent years, BYD has made sizeable investments in the chip sector.

In 2021, BYD acquired a semiconductor plant in Jinan, Shandong province for 5 billion yuan. The following year, it invested in two digital signal processing companies.

Meanwhile, BYD is also working with some of the leading tech companies in the field, including Nvidia Corporation, an American multinational tech company that designs system-on-a-chip units (SoCs) for the automotive market, and Horizon, a leader in computing solutions for intelligent vehicles.?