LIVE FROM HUAWEI CONNECT, SHANGHAI: Huawei rotating chair Eric Xu detailed the company’s roadmap for AI computing platforms, with plans to release the world’s most powerful single system in Q4 2026 and double the performance with a new launch a year later.
In his opening keynote, Xu unveiled the Atlas 950 SuperPoD supporting more than 8,000 Ascend GPUs and scheduled for launch in Q4 next year. It will feature 128 computing racks and cover about 1,000 sq metres.
The announcement is the first time the company has shared its long-term chip plans and comes after years of remaining silent on key technology developments.
He compared the development with Nvidia’s next upgrade, scheduled to come out in H2 next year. The Atlas 950 will deliver 6.7 times greater computing power and 15 times more memory capacity, reaching 1152TB.
In Q4 2027, Huawei will ship the Atlas 960 SuperPod fitted with up to 15,488 Ascend 960 chips. The system will have a computing power of 30 exaflops and memory capacity of 4,460TB.
Xu stated the two systems will lead the world in key metrics and remain the world’s most powerful super nodes for many years to come. He added Huawei believes the impact goes beyond AI, as the technology can bring significant value to general purpose computing on the demand side in China.
Huawei has been subject to sanctions from the west, blocking its access to the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing process nodes, he noted. “We need to put together less advanced chips and form them into a super pod, which can work as one computer.”
Power in numbers
He acknowledged at the chip level, the performance of an individual AI Huawei chip is not as good as Nvidia’s, “but at a super pod level, we can deliver the most powerful systems in the market”.
Speaking a day after a Chinese regulator reportedly ordered domestic technology companies to stop buying Nvidia AI chips, Xu reminded the audience of a forecast he made last year at the event that China will continue to lag behind in semiconductor manufacturing for “a very long time”.
Over the next three years, Huawei will release three new series of Ascend chips: the 950 series, including the 950PR and the 950DT, the 960 and the 970.
Within the 950 line-up, the Ascent 950PR is optimised for the prefilled stage of inference and for recommendation, and will be available in the first quarter of 2026 in two form factors. The 950DT, with interconnected bandwidth reaching 2Tb/s, will ship in Q4 2026.
The Ascend 960 will have twice the computing power, memory bandwidth and memory capacity of its predecessor and will be available in Q4 2027.