From late May to mid-June 2026, leading international power semiconductor enterprises including Infineon, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments issued successive price hike notices, triggering a new round of price surges for automotive-grade chips, which have severely impacted the global supply chain of electric vehicles (EVs). Both domestic and overseas vehicle and battery manufacturers are ramping up independent R&D of automotive-grade chips and expanding domestic alternative channels to ease dual pressures of costs and supply shortages.
Overseas chip manufacturers have rolled out pricing adjustments intensively. On May 26, Infineon formally notified all global clients that it would raise prices of all automotive-grade power devices starting July 1 due to continuous increases in costs of silicon wafers, special industrial gases, energy and ocean freight, as well as persistent tight supply of automotive chips. This marks the company's second price increase within the year. STMicroelectronics followed closely by announcing it would lift prices of core EV chips such as IGBTs and MCUs starting June 28. ON Semiconductor and Texas Instruments have raised prices in tandem, while domestic manufacturers of automotive chips including Zhichuang Microelectronics and Guoneng Technology also moderately adjusted their quotations upward.
Data from industrial analysis institutions shows that the global market size of automotive-grade power semiconductors is expected to reach USD 18 billion in 2026, representing a year-on-year growth of 22%. However, the growth rate of new global wafer production capacity stands at only 10%, resulting in a long-term supply-demand gap. The popularization of electrification and intelligent driving has drastically boosted the chip consumption per vehicle. A mainstream 800V high-voltage pure electric vehicle requires more than three times the number of IGBTs, main control chips and sensor chips compared with gasoline vehicles. The combination of chip shortages and price hikes has directly extended vehicle delivery cycles and lifted manufacturing costs per unit. European and American automakers bear the brunt of this impact: Stellantis and General Motors have repeatedly issued production cut warnings recently, and the delivery lead time of some pure electric models has been prolonged to more than three months.
Faced with volatile external chip supplies, China's new energy industry chain has adopted a dual strategy of domestic substitution and independent R&D. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has recently launched a special initiative of "AI + Manufacturing", focusing on supporting breakthroughs in vehicle-mounted chips and operating systems. BYD keeps iterating its self-developed automotive-grade IGBTs, which are deployed across all its vehicle models and overseas battery plants. CATL has rolled out dedicated main control chips for power batteries, realizing independent control of core components in battery management systems. NIO, XPeng and Xiaomi continue to increase investment in independent R&D of self-driving SoCs and power chips to reduce reliance on foreign chips. Statistics indicate that the localization rate of chips used in Chinese self-brand EVs rose to 41% in 2026, up 12 percentage points from 2025.
Overseas automakers are also scaling up independent R&D to cut external procurement costs. Tesla keeps expanding its chip production line in Austin, with its self-developed HW4.0 autonomous driving chips fully replacing outsourced solutions. Volkswagen and BMW have respectively set up semiconductor R&D centers, cooperating with European wafer foundries to develop exclusive power chips for EVs to cope with continuous price hikes by international manufacturers.
Industry experts predict the current chip price hike cycle will last until the first half of 2027, and cost pressures on the EV sector will remain difficult to alleviate in the short run. In the long term, independently controllable chip industrial chains and regional supporting wafer production lines will become standard development paths for global automakers. China's complete supporting system covering EV whole vehicles and chips will further consolidate the country's global competitive edge in the electric vehicle industry. Meanwhile, MIIT has rolled out supporting incentive policies with increased subsidies for capacity expansion of automotive-grade chip production lines, accelerating efforts to tackle bottlenecks in the industrial chain and stabilize domestic production, sales and export volumes of new energy vehicles.