Rotating chairman Wang Tao unveiled the Ascend 960 SuperPoD at the Huawei Connect 2026 conference in Shanghai on Thursday. A single SuperPoD connects 4,096 cards and delivers 8 EFLOPS of FP8 compute with 1 PB of HBM to run models of up to 10 trillion parameters. The system utilizes 5,500 Hi-ONE optical engines to replace 48,000 800G optical modules, which cuts power consumption by more than 550 kW and lifts system availability to 99.8%.
The Ascend 960DT AI chip launches in the first quarter of 2027, followed by the 960PR in the third quarter. This transition to near-packaged optics allows light to replace electrical signals next to the chip package to bypass constraints on semiconductor manufacturing processes. Huawei has already deployed more than 1,000 Ascend 910C SuperPoDs and schedules the air-cooled Atlas 860 for shipment in the second quarter of 2027.
Key sources
- SOURCE@carrioresearch“A single SuperPoD links 4,096 cards, delivers up to 8 EFLOPS of FP8 compute with 1 PB of HBM, and is designed to train and run models of up to 10 trillion parameters”x.com
- SUPPORT@poezhao0605“Huawei's next AI supernode drops 48,000 optical modules for 5,500 Huawei-developed optical engines”x.com
- SUPPORT@badsignalai“Ascend 960DT is targeted for Q1 2027 / 960PR for Q3 2027 (Huawei + Reuters)”x.com
- SOURCE@reuters“China's Huawei sets 2027 launch for new AI chips as it targets Nvidia”x.com
- SUPPORT@wallstengine“shipped 1,000+ supernode systems to 370+ customers and says its supercluster architecture can scale to 1 million NPUs”x.com
- SUPPORT@financialjuice“Huawei is testing its AI chips in limited foreign markets”x.com
- SUPPORT@financialjuice“Huawei has a bigger China AI chip market share than Nvidia $NVDA”x.com
- SUPPORT@financialjuice“Huawei faces constraints in expanding production for AI chips”x.com