Huawei Accelerates Ascend 960 AI Chip Launch to Rival Nvidia

During the Huawei Connect 2026 conference in Shanghai, Huawei Technologies announced it will release the Ascend 960DT training chip in the first quarter of 2027, moving the date up by nine months. The company will follow this with the Ascend 960PR inference chip in the third quarter of 2027, with further upgrades planned for the Ascend 970 and 980 series in 2028 and 2029. Rotating Chairman David Wang stated the new chip will deliver twice the performance of its predecessor.

To challenge Nvidia's dominance, Huawei introduced the Peerium Computing Architecture and the Atlas 960 SuperPoD. This system uses UnifiedBus technology and nested parallelism to allow up to one million processors to function as a single computer. The company is already deploying the Atlas 950 SuperCluster, which features 256,000 cards.

Despite these advancements, Deputy Chairman Eric Xu noted that production shortages in memory, storage, and optical components are forcing the company to prioritize Chinese demand. These constraints have hindered large-scale orders, including a planned deployment of 160,000 Ascend 950DT chips by DeepSeek in Inner Mongolia. While Huawei claims to have overtaken Nvidia in China, some reports indicate leading Chinese AI labs still rely on U.S. processors.

These developments precede a September 24 meeting in Washington between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Trump has emphasized the strategic necessity of U.S. leadership in the sector, asserting that whoever wins in AI wins.