Huawei announced that the launch timing of its next-generation AI chip called Ascend 960DT has been moved to the first quarter of 2027; a decision seen in the context of the Chinese company's increasing competition with NVIDIA and Beijing's efforts to narrow the AI computing power gap with the United States.
According to ITNA quoting TechCrunch, the news was announced Thursday during the annual "Huawei Connect" conference. A Huawei spokesperson said the company had previously planned to release the chip in the third quarter of 2027, but has now moved the timeline forward by about two quarters.
The Huawei spokesperson said the Ascend 960DT chip will be ready in the first quarter of 2027 and the Ascend 960 family of chips will be released earlier than planned with double the performance.
He said David Wang, chairman of Huawei's board, announced this new timing at the Huawei Connect conference.
The announcement came just one week before a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, scheduled for September 24 in Washington.
Huawei's AI supercomputers
Huawei's grand strategy is to turn hundreds of thousands and in the future millions of AI chips into an integrated supercomputer; an approach the company calls the "Peerium computing architecture."
This architecture is based on UnifiedBus technology, which is responsible for connecting processors to memory, storage, and networking equipment.
Huawei said in a company statement that it will use this new architecture to build larger AI computing systems, both for model training and for inference.
The first systems based on this architecture are the Atlas 950 SuperPoD and SuperCluster, and according to Huawei, each Atlas 950 SuperCluster can connect up to 256,000 accelerator cards.
Ambiguities about the scale of the systems
Despite the positive news of the accelerated chip launch, some analysts have doubts about the scale of the announced systems.
Rui Ma, a China tech analyst, wrote on X that Huawei had previously said the Atlas 960 SuperPoD would support up to 15,488 Ascend 960 chips, but this week's announcement referred to a system with 4,096 chips.
He said the chip itself is coming much earlier than scheduled, but the introduced SuperPoD is significantly smaller than the original plan.
U.S.-China competition over semiconductors
Despite U.S. restrictions on China's access to advanced semiconductor technologies, Huawei has continued its chip development path.
The analyst believes such restrictions are unlikely to prevent China's progress in semiconductors, because the country's interests in self-sufficiency are very high.
On the other side, Trump has resisted calls from some AI industry executives to slow the pace of development of the technology for safety reasons and argues that the U.S. must maintain its advantage over China.
In contrast, Huawei's chairman has stated that China should accelerate AI development to make up for lagging behind the U.S., and Chinese companies must advance further before they can properly understand and manage the risks of more powerful AI systems.