Lei Jun posted a set of numbers on Weibo: Xiaomi will invest 60 billion yuan in AI over the next three years. At least 16 billion in 2026 alone.
What does 60 billion look like? Xiaomi's net profit for all of 2025 was 39.2 billion. This investment equals roughly a year and a half of that. R&D spending in Q1 alone hit 9 billion, up 33.4% year over year, with 26,048 R&D staff on board—all record highs.
Xiaomi is transforming from a phone company into an AI company. But look closer and a problem emerges: Xiaomi's AI portfolio already appears fairly complete—the MiMo foundation model, the miclaw phone Agent, the Agent ecosystem platform, 1.1 billion IoT devices, and 746 million monthly active users. Everything seems to be in place, yet Lei Jun clearly isn't satisfied.
He's looking for a missing puzzle piece. Without it, that 60-billion investment can't be fully converted into commercial value.
I. Xiaomi's AI Portfolio
