Huawei Moves Up Launch of Ascend 960DT AI Chip to Q1 2027
Huawei said at its Huawei Connect conference that the Ascend 960DT AI chip will arrive in the first quarter of 2027, earlier than the previously planned third quarter, as the company presses its challenge to Nvidia.
A Huawei spokesperson told TechCrunch that the Ascend 960DT "is expected to be ready in Q1 2027" and that Ascend 960 chips are launching ahead of schedule, doubling performance and advancing year by year. David Wang, Huawei's rotating and acting chairman, announced the updated timeline at Huawei Connect on Thursday.
The announcement came about a week before U.S. President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet on September 24 in Washington, DC.
Huawei is working to link hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of AI chips into a single giant computer through an approach it calls Peerium Computing Architecture. The design relies on UnifiedBus, Huawei's technology for connecting processors with memory, storage and networking hardware. Eric Xu, Huawei's rotating chairman, said in the company's statement that Huawei is using the new architecture to build larger AI computing systems intended for both training and inference.
The Atlas 950 SuperPoD and SuperCluster are the first systems built on that architecture. Huawei says an Atlas 950 SuperCluster can connect up to 256,000 accelerator cards.
The faster chip timeline left questions about the wider systems. China tech analyst Rui Ma said on X that Huawei had previously said its Atlas 960 SuperPoD would scale to 15,488 Ascend 960 chips, while this week's announcement referred to a system with 4,096 chips. "The chip itself is coming WAY earlier, but the SuperPoD they announced is much smaller than what they originally laid out," Ma wrote.
Huawei has continued to push its chip ambitions despite U.S. restrictions on China's access to advanced semiconductor technology. Ma said those restrictions are unlikely to stop China from pursuing its own semiconductor technology. "I think it's futile to stop China's development in semiconductors because the stakes for self-sufficiency are just too high at this point," she wrote.
Trump has pushed back against calls from AI industry leaders to slow the development of the technology over safety concerns, arguing that the United States needs to maintain its lead over China. Xu, in comments reported by the Financial Times, argued that China needs to accelerate AI development to catch up with the United States, saying Chinese companies need to advance further before they can fully understand and address the risks posed by more powerful AI systems.
Editor's Summary
Huawei has moved the launch of its Ascend 960DT AI chip to the first quarter of 2027 from the third quarter, with David Wang announcing the change at Huawei Connect. The company is pairing the chip with its Peerium Computing Architecture and Atlas 950 systems, though an analyst noted the announced SuperPoD configuration is smaller than an earlier plan. The timing lands a week before a scheduled Trump-Xi meeting and underscores Huawei's continued chip push under U.S. export restrictions.