Huawei Accelerates Ascend 960DT AI Chip Launch to Q1 2027, Challenging Nvidia
During its Huawei Connect conference on Thursday, Huawei revealed plans to introduce its Ascend 960DT AI chip in the first quarter of 2027, advancing from the previously scheduled third quarter. David Wang, the rotating chairman of Huawei, shared this revised timeline. This announcement comes ahead of the upcoming meeting between U.S. President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, set for September 24 in Washington, DC. Huawei aims to implement its Peerium Computing Architecture to integrate AI chips into a comprehensive computing system, with the Atlas 950 SuperPoD and SuperCluster being the initial systems. Analyst Rui Ma highlighted inconsistencies in scaling capabilities. According to the Financial Times, Trump is against hindering AI progress, while Xu emphasizes the need for China to speed up to match the U.S.
Key facts
- Huawei will launch its Ascend 960DT AI chip in Q1 2027, moved up from Q3 2027.
- The announcement was made at Huawei Connect on Thursday by David Wang, Huawei's rotating and acting chairman.
- The chip is intended to challenge Nvidia.
- Huawei's Peerium Computing Architecture uses UnifiedBus to link processors with memory, storage, and networking hardware.
- The Atlas 950 SuperPoD and SuperCluster are the first systems based on the architecture, with an Atlas 950 SuperCluster connecting up to 256,000 accelerator cards.
- Analyst Rui Ma noted a discrepancy: the Atlas 960 SuperPoD was previously said to scale to 15,488 Ascend 960 chips, but the new announcement referred to 4,096 chips.
- Trump and Xi Jinping are set to meet on September 24 in Washington, DC, a week after the announcement.
- Eric Xu, Huawei's rotating chairman, said the architecture is for building larger AI systems for training and inference.
Entities
Artists
- David Wang
- Eric Xu
- Rui Ma
- Donald Trump
- Xi Jinping
- David Wang Tao
Institutions
- Huawei
- Nvidia
- TechCrunch
- Financial Times
- Huawei Technologies
- qz.com
- Huawei Connect 2026
Locations
- Washington, DC
- United States
- China
- Shanghai