Huawei announced at its Huawei Connect conference that it is accelerating the launch of its next-generation Ascend 960DT AI chip to the first quarter of 2027, moving up from a previously planned Q3 2027 release, as the company races to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in AI hardware. A Huawei spokesperson said Ascend chips are launching ahead of schedule with performance doubling year over year, with rotating chairman David Wang announcing the updated timeline.
The announcement comes a week before US President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet in Washington. Rotating chairman Eric Xu said Huawei is applying its new Peerium Computing Architecture, which links large numbers of AI chips using its UnifiedBus technology, to build larger training and inference systems. The company’s Atlas 950 SuperPoD and SuperCluster represent its first systems built on this architecture, with the SuperCluster capable of connecting up to 256,000 accelerator cards.
China tech analyst Rui Ma noted that while the chip timeline accelerated significantly, the announced SuperPoD system scales to far fewer chips than Huawei had previously indicated, suggesting a tradeoff between speed and scale. Ma said US semiconductor restrictions were unlikely to halt China’s pursuit of self-sufficiency given the high stakes involved. Trump has resisted calls from AI industry leaders to slow AI development, citing competition with China, while Xu has argued Chinese firms need to accelerate development to close the gap with the US.
