Huawei has moved the launch of its Ascend 960DT AI chip to the first quarter of 2027. The company made this announcement on Thursday at Huawei Connect.
A spokesperson told TechCrunch the Chinese firm had originally planned for a release in the third quarter of 2027.
“The Ascend 960DT is expected to be ready in Q1 2027. Ascend 960 chips are launching ahead of schedule, doubling performance and advancing year by year,” the spokesperson said. David Wang, Huawei’s rotating and acting chairman, announced the updated timeline during the event.
The announcement arrives just a week before U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet on September 24 in Washington, DC.
Huawei aims to connect hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of AI chips into one giant computer. The company calls this approach its Peerium Computing Architecture. It relies on UnifiedBus, Huawei’s technology for linking processors with memory, storage, and networking hardware. Eric Xu, Huawei’s rotating chairman, said in the company’s statement that it is using its new Peerium Computing Architecture to build larger AI computing systems designed for both training and inference.
Huawei’s Atlas 950 SuperPoD and SuperCluster are the first systems based on the architecture. The company says an Atlas 950 SuperCluster can connect up to 256,000 accelerator cards.
The accelerated chip timeline brings questions about Huawei’s broader AI systems. China tech analyst Rui Ma said on X that Huawei had previously stated its Atlas 960 SuperPoD would scale to 15,488 Ascend 960 chips, while this week’s announcement referred to 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.
Huawei has continued to advance its chip ambitions despite U.S. restrictions on China’s access to advanced semiconductor technology. Ma said that those restrictions are unlikely to stop China from pursuing its own semiconductor technology.
“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 pushed back against calls from AI industry leaders to slow the development of the technology over safety concerns, arguing that the U.S. needs to maintain its lead over China. Meanwhile, Xu argued that China needs to accelerate AI development to catch up with the U.S., saying Chinese companies need to advance further before they can fully understand and address the risks posed by more powerful AI systems, according to the Financial Times.
What it means
Developers and data scientists working with Huawei hardware will see new clusters available sooner than expected, but the total number of chips in those initial clusters is lower than previously planned.
