A new front has opened in China’s electric-vehicle tech war as carmakers design their own smart-driving chips, turning custom silicon into the industry’s weapon of choice in the world’s largest auto market.

The latest salvo came on Monday after Li Auto unveiled the Mach M100, a 5-nanometre artificial-intelligence chip tailored for autonomous driving.

Designed for the carmaker’s new L9 Livis SUV model, the chip displayed single-unit computing power of 1,280 trillion operations per second (TOPS) – a metric of how fast an AI brain can process incoming data, Li Auto said. It achieved a highly efficient 82 per cent utilisation rate, the firm added.

The announcement followed a string of breakthroughs by its rivals.

Weeks earlier, world-leading EV maker BYD debuted its Xuanji A3, a 4nm smart-driving chip now in mass production. Capable of supporting Level 3 and Level 4 autonomous-driving functions, a trio of Xuanji A3 chips working in tandem can deliver more than 2,100 TOPS of processing power, the company said.

Higher TOPS allow a vehicle’s computers to make split-second driving decisions by simultaneously crunching feeds from various sources such as radar and lidar sensors.

Meanwhile, Nio has introduced its own 5nm NX9031 chip and Xpeng is developing its proprietary Turing chip for next-generation intelligent-driving systems.