Xiaomi's Lei Jun Quadruples AI Budget to $8.7 Billion As MiMo-V2-Pro Excites Developers
By Reuters | 19 Mar, 2026

The new agentic AI model developed by Xiaomi's youthful female-led research team, and recently released anonymously, has already racked up 1.5 trillion tokens and rave reviews, putting the smartphone and EV company on path to becoming an AI power.

Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun speaks at the Chinese smartphone maker's launch event in Beijing, China May 22, 2025. REUTERS/Florence Lo/File Photo

Chinese smartphone and electric vehicle giant Xiaomi will invest at least 60 billion yuan ($8.70 billion) in artificial intelligence over the next three years, CEO Lei Jun said on Thursday.

The announcement came a day after the company officially unveiled its new flagship AI model MiMo-V2-Pro, a large language model originally uploaded anonymously onto OpenRouter last week. 

The model has shot up the AI gateway platform's leaderboard rankings, so far processing more than 1.5 trillion tokens or units of data, a sign that it has been well received by developers worldwide. 

Lei, speaking at a company event in Beijing, highlighted MiMo-V2-Pro's global reception, saying it would rapidly improve, and revealed Xiaomi's budget for AI research this year had exceeded the previously announced 16 billion yuan figure.

"So you will see that we will advance faster and faster in many core technologies," he said.

Xiaomi's increased investment in AI comes as competition in China's cutthroat chatbot space is being redirected to agents, which require far less prompting and can execute more complex tasks. 

While AI chatbots in China have faced intense downward price pressures, particularly since DeepSeek's ascent in the past two years, tech firms are eyeing the much higher token consumption required by agents as a potentially new lucrative revenue stream. 

MiMo-V2-Pro was created to handle agent workloads, according to Lei, as agent frameworks like OpenClaw take China by storm, prompting Chinese tech giants from Alibaba to Tencent to jump on the trend in the hopes of generating new streams of revenue.

"Developers around the world have commented that V2-Pro has a high IQ, also a high EQ, and crucially its task execution ability is both fast and accurate... underscoring its huge global impact," Lei said.

Lei also noted the youthfulness of the team behind MiMo-V2-Pro, boasting an average age of 25, and with over half of its members holding doctorate degrees or hailing from China's top two universities, PKU and Tsinghua. MiMo is led by ex-DeepSeek researcher and PKU graduate Luo Fuli, who was born in 1995. 

($1 = 6.8998 Chinese yuan renminbi)

(Reporting by Ju-min Park and Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Jan Harvey)