Huawei aims to take on Nvidia by bringing forward the launch of its next-generation Ascend 960DT AI chip to the first quarter of 2027, the company announced at Thursday’s Huawei Connect conference.
The Chinese tech giant previously planned to launch the chip in the third quarter of 2027, a Huawei spokesperson told TechCrunch.
“The Ascend 960DT is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2027. The Ascend 960 chip was launched ahead of schedule, doubles in performance, and is evolving year on year,” the spokesperson said, adding that Huawei’s rotating and acting chairman, David Wang, announced the latest timeline at Huawei Connect on Thursday.
The announcement came just a week before U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping were scheduled to meet in Washington, D.C., on September 24.
Huawei is turning hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of AI chips into one giant computer. The Chinese technology company calls this approach Piarium computing architecture. It relies on UnifiedBus, Huawei’s technology for linking processors with memory, storage, and network hardware. Eric Xu, Huawei’s rotating chairman, said in a company statement that the company is using the new Peerium computing architecture to build large-scale AI computing systems designed for both training and inference.
Huawei’s Atlas 950 SuperPoD and SuperCluster are the first systems based on this architecture. The company says the Atlas 950 SuperCluster can connect up to 256,000 accelerator cards.
But the accelerated chip schedule also comes with some questions about Huawei’s extensive AI systems. Chinese technology analyst Louis Ma told X that Huawei had previously said the Atlas 960 SuperPoD would be expanded to 15,488 Ascend 960 chips, but this week’s announcement referred to a system with 4,096 chips. “While the chip itself is coming fairly quickly, the announced SuperPoD is much smaller than what was originally announced,” Ma wrote.
Huawei has continued to advance its chip development ambitions despite U.S. restrictions on China’s access to advanced semiconductor technology. Ma said such regulations are unlikely to prevent China from pursuing its own semiconductor technology.
“I think it would be futile to halt China’s semiconductor development because the stakes for self-sufficiency are too high at this point,” she wrote.
President Trump has argued that the United States needs to maintain its lead over China and has pushed back against calls from AI industry leaders to slow technology development over safety concerns. Meanwhile, Xu argued that China needs to accelerate its AI development to catch up with the United States, and said Chinese companies need to make further progress to fully understand and address the risks posed by more powerful AI systems, according to the Financial Times.
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