When an anonymous language model appeared on the OpenRouter platform last week and instantly dominated the performance rankings, the technology industry began to speculate who was behind the new contender for the title of AI leader.
The conundrum was solved in Beijing: it was Xiaomi, a company hitherto associated mainly with smartphones and the booming electric car sector, that officially unveiled the MiMo-V2-Pro model.
CEO Lei Jun does not intend to stop at one success story. He has just announced an investment plan worth 60 billion yuan (around $8.7 billion) to establish the company as a powerhouse in the field of artificial intelligence over the next three years.
This strategic shift in emphasis shows that Xiaomi sees AI not just as an add-on to hardware, but as the foundation of its future business ecosystem.
The success of the MiMo-V2-Pro model, which has already processed more than 1.5 trillion tokens, stems from a precision strike at a market niche. While the Chinese chatbot market is struggling with a devastating price war, Xiaomi is betting on ‘agentisation’.
The model is designed to work with frameworks such as OpenClaw, which allow artificial intelligence to autonomously perform complex tasks with minimal human support. For the business, this means moving from simple text-based responses to real process automation, opening up new high-margin revenue streams for the company.
Lei Jun stresses that the key to success is the unique team structure. The project is led by Luo Fuli, just 29 years old former DeepSeek researcher, and the average age of the engineers is 25. This young cadre, recruited from China’s top universities (PKU and Tsinghua), has managed to create a tool that the developers describe as having a high ‘IQ and EQ’ – a rare combination of processing speed and accurate contextual understanding.
