Huawei Moves Up Ascend 960DT AI Chip Launch to Q1 2027

Huawei is pulling its next-generation Ascend 960DT AI chip forward to the first quarter of 2027, the company announced Thursday at its Huawei Connect conference. The chip had previously been slated for the third quarter of 2027, a Huawei spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The spokesperson said the Ascend 960 chips are launching ahead of schedule, with double the performance and year-over-year improvements. David Wang, Huawei's rotating and acting chairman, revealed the updated timeline at the event.

The news lands just a week before U.S. President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet on September 24 in Washington, DC.

Huawei is working to link hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of AI chips into a single massive computer through what it calls Peerium Computing Architecture, which relies on its UnifiedBus technology for connecting processors with memory, storage and networking hardware. Rotating chairman Eric Xu said the company is using the architecture to build larger AI systems for both training and inference. The first systems built on it are the Atlas 950 SuperPoD and SuperCluster, which Huawei says can connect up to 256,000 accelerator cards.

The faster chip timeline raises questions about Huawei's wider AI systems, though. China tech analyst Rui Ma noted on X that Huawei had previously said its Atlas 960 SuperPoD would scale to 15,488 Ascend 960 chips, while this week's announcement referenced a system with 4,096 chips. "The chip itself is coming WAY earlier, but the SuperPoD they announced is much smaller than what they originally laid out," Ma wrote.

Ma also said U.S. restrictions on China's access to advanced semiconductor technology are unlikely to halt the country's semiconductor progress. "I think it's futile to stop China's development in semiconductors because the stakes for self-sufficiency are just too high at this point," she wrote.

Trump has resisted calls from AI industry leaders to slow the technology's development over safety concerns, arguing the U.S. must stay ahead of China. Xu, meanwhile, argued that China needs to speed up AI development to catch up with the U.S., saying Chinese companies must advance further before they can fully understand and address the risks of more powerful AI systems, according to Financial Times.

Source: TechCrunch