SHANGHAI: Huawei Ascend 960 processors will begin arriving in 2027 as the Chinese technology company moves to a one-generation-per-year AI chip cycle, Huawei confirmed Thursday.
David Wang, Huawei deputy chairman and rotating chairman, announced the roadmap at HUAWEI CONNECT 2026 in Shanghai on September 17. The Ascend 960DT is due in the first quarter of 2027, followed by the Ascend 960PR in the third quarter.
The company then plans to release the Ascend 970 in 2028 and Ascend 980 in 2029. Huawei says computing specifications should roughly double with each generation under its planned development cycle.
Huawei is pairing the new processors with larger systems rather than relying only on individual-chip performance.
Its Atlas 960E SuperPoD can connect as many as 4,096 neural processing units, or NPUs. Huawei says the system delivers 8 EFLOPS of FP8 computing performance and up to one petabyte of high-bandwidth memory.
Meanwhile, Huawei introduced Hi-ONE, a near-packaged optical interconnect system with a stated transmission capacity of 7.2 Tbit/s per engine.
The company combines that technology with UnifiedBus, its architecture for connecting processors, memory, storage and networking hardware. Huawei says this approach allows multiple SuperPoDs to operate together as much larger computing clusters.
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At the upper end, Huawei says its SuperCluster architecture can scale to as many as one million NPUs. The company presented that system-level scaling as central to its AI infrastructure strategy.
The Huawei Ascend 960 roadmap comes as Chinese technology companies continue developing domestic alternatives to imported advanced processors.
U.S. export rules still restrict Chinese users’ access to some advanced computing technologies. However, Washington revised its licensing policy in January 2026 to allow applications for Nvidia H200, AMD MI325X and comparable products to receive case-by-case review under specified conditions.
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Huawei’s Ascend strategy is an effort to compete more directly with Nvidia while reducing China’s dependence on foreign AI hardware.
Huawei has not claimed that a single Ascend 960 processor outperforms every current Nvidia accelerator. Instead, its latest announcements emphasise annual chip improvements combined with increasingly large interconnected computing systems.
