Huawei’s Future Plans for Ascend Chips

Huawei, the Chinese technology giant, has announced its plans for the next generation of Ascend chips during the Huawei Connect 2025 event in Shanghai this week. In his keynote speech, Eric Xu, Huawei’s Deputy Chairman, described 2025 as a memorable year, highlighting the launch of DeepSeek-R1 in January as a turning point for the company.

Challenges in Semiconductor Manufacturing

Xu acknowledged that China is likely to lag in semiconductor manufacturing processes for a relatively long time. The country’s technology sector faces challenges due to tariffs and trade bans imposed by some countries, hindering access to the latest manufacturing technologies.

In response to these challenges, Huawei is focusing on improving infrastructure design and technology. Additionally, the company has open-sourced many of its software, including AI models for the openPangu foundation and the Mind SDK series.

New Expansions in Ascend Chips

Huawei plans to produce three new series of Ascend chips: 950, 960, and 970. The Ascend 950PR and 950TO will be launched from the same mold, with additional support for low-precision data formats like FP8.

The Ascend 950 chips will provide an internal communication bandwidth of up to 2 terabytes per second, 2.5 times higher than the current Ascend 910C. The Ascend 950PR is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2026, while the Ascend 950DT will be launched in the fourth quarter of the same year.

SuperPods and SuperClusters Technology

Huawei plans to introduce computing clusters in the form of SuperPods, which will begin to appear in the fourth quarter of 2026 with the launch of the Atlas 950 SuperPod. Huawei claims its SuperPod will contain 56.8 times more GPUs than NVIDIA’s competing NVL144 system, offering nearly seven times the processing power.

In the last quarter of 2027, Huawei plans to launch the Atlas 960 SuperCluster, which will include over a million neural processing units and achieve performance up to 4 ZFLOPS using FP4.

Conclusion

Huawei is taking bold steps towards the future by introducing the latest technologies in Ascend chips and expanding their use in supercomputing fields. The company focuses on improving infrastructure and opening up to the developer community through open protocols. Despite the challenges in semiconductor manufacturing, Huawei remains a leader in technological innovation, strengthening its position in the global market.