Huawei's Ascend 960DT AI chip will ship in the first quarter of 2027 instead of the third. David Wang, rotating and acting chairman, announced the change on Thursday at the company's Huawei Connect conference.
A company spokesperson told TechCrunch that the Ascend 960 series is launching ahead of schedule and doubles performance compared with the previous generation. That figure comes from Huawei and has not been independently checked.
What Huawei showed
The chips slot into an architecture Huawei calls Peerium, linked by its own UnifiedBus interconnect. According to the company, the Atlas 950 SuperCluster can connect up to 256,000 accelerator cards.
The new SuperPoD, the basic building block of such a cluster, holds 4,096 chips. Earlier plans described 15,488 chips per unit.
Timing and rivals
The announcement came a week before US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping were scheduled to meet in Washington on September 24. Eric Xu, another of Huawei's rotating chairmen, said China needs to speed up AI development to catch the United States. TechCrunch, citing the Financial Times, reports that Xu also argued Chinese companies must advance further before they can fully understand the risks of more powerful AI systems.
Analyst Rui Ma wrote on X that the chip itself arrives much earlier, but the announced SuperPoD is much smaller than before. Nvidia remains the benchmark Huawei measures itself against, and exports of its most powerful chips to China are still restricted.
