Summary:
1. Huawei announced plans for new generations of its Ascend chip line at the Huawei Connect 2025 event in Shanghai.
2. The company will release three new series of chips, including the Ascend 950, 960, and 970, with improved performance and capabilities.
3. Huawei’s strategy includes the development of SuperPoDs of NPUs and general computing chips, as well as the implementation of an open-source connectivity protocol.
Article:
Huawei recently unveiled its ambitious plans for the future of its Ascend chip line during the Huawei Connect 2025 event held in Shanghai. At the event, Eric Xu, deputy chair of the Huawei board, highlighted the significance of 2025 as a “memorable year” for the company, especially with the introduction of the groundbreaking DeepSeek-R1 earlier in the year. Despite acknowledging China’s potential lag in semiconductor manufacturing process nodes, Huawei remains focused on advancing infrastructure design and technology.
The company’s upcoming releases will include three new series of the Ascend chip: the 950, 960, and 970. The Ascend 950 series, which will feature the 950PR and 950TO chips, promises enhanced support for low-precision data formats and improved vector processing. Additionally, the Ascend 960, set for release in 2027, will offer twice the computing power, memory capacity, and interconnect bandwidth compared to the 950 series. The most powerful chip, the Ascend 970, is expected to launch in 2028 with significantly higher specs across the board.
In line with its strategy, Huawei is also working on SuperPoDs of NPUs and general computing chips. These SuperPoDs will offer hyperscalers clusters of raw compute power, with the first Atlas 950 SuperPoD scheduled for release in late 2026. Huawei aims to outperform competitors like NVIDIA with its SuperPoDs, providing superior processing power and efficiency.
Furthermore, Huawei plans to introduce an open-source connectivity protocol, UnifiedBus 2.0, to connect its SuperPoDs and form SuperClusters. This protocol will be instrumental in powering the company’s future computing solutions, including the Atlas 950 SuperCluster and the upcoming Atlas 960 SuperCluster, which is expected to deliver an impressive 4 ZFLOPS in FP4. With these innovations, Huawei is poised to meet the growing demand for high-performance computing solutions in the coming years.
