Huawei Moves Up Launch of Next-Generation Ascend 960DT AI Chip to Early 2027
aiinsider ·
Huawei said at Huawei Connect that it will launch its next-generation Ascend 960DT AI chip in the first quarter of 2027, ahead of the previously planned third-quarter release. The company said Ascend chips are arriving ahead of schedule and that their performance is doubling year over year, while rotating chairman David Wang announced the revised timetable. Rotating chairman Eric Xu said Huawei is using its Peerium Computing Architecture and UnifiedBus technology to connect large numbers of chips for larger AI training and inference systems. Huawei’s Atlas 950 SuperPoD and SuperCluster are its first systems based on that architecture, and the SuperCluster can connect up to 256,000 accelerator cards. Analyst Rui Ma observed that the announced SuperPoD scales to far fewer chips than Huawei had previously indicated, potentially reflecting a tradeoff between launch speed and scale. The announcement comes before a scheduled meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, as the two countries compete in AI development; Ma said US semiconductor restrictions were unlikely to stop China’s push for self-sufficiency.
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