Huawei announced on Thursday at its Huawei Connect conference that it is accelerating the launch of its next-generation Ascend 960DT AI chip. The chip, previously planned for Q3 2027, is now expected to be ready in the first quarter of 2027.
A Huawei spokesperson stated that the Ascend 960 chips are launching ahead of schedule, with an aim to double performance year by year. David Wang, Huawei’s rotating and acting chairman, confirmed this updated timeline.
The Chinese tech firm is also developing its Peerium Computing Architecture, which uses UnifiedBus technology to link processors with memory, storage, and networking hardware. This architecture is intended to build larger AI computing systems for both training and inference, with the Atlas 950 SuperPoD and SuperCluster being the first systems based on it.
However, China tech analyst Rui Ma noted that while the chip's timeline is accelerated, the announced Atlas 960 SuperPoD system is smaller than previously outlined, referring to a system with 4,096 chips compared to an earlier mention of 15,488 Ascend 960 chips.