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1 month ago
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Chinese tech giant Huawei has kicked off its annual “Connect” conference by laying out a plan to deliver increasingly powerful AI processors that look to have enough power that Middle Kingdom users won’t need to try getting Nvidia parts across the border.
Huawei already offers the Ascend 910C accelerator that Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek is thought to have used to develop its impressively efficient models. At Connect today, Huawei promised four successors.
First off the rank, in the first quarter of 2026, will be the Ascend 950PR which, according to slideware shown at the conference, will boast one petaflop performance with the 8-bit floating-point (FP8) computation units used for many AI inferencing workloads. The chip will also include 2 TB/s interconnect bandwidth and 128GB of 1.6 TB/s memory. In 2026’s final quarter Huawei plans to deliver the 950DT, which will be capable of two petaflops of FP4 performance thanks to the inclusion of 144GB of 4 TB/s memory.
In 2027, Huawei plans the Ascend 960 that will include 288GB of 9.6TB/s memory. 2028 will see the debut of the Ascend 970, in which memory will speed along at 14.4 TB/s.
Those memory speeds suggest Huawei has created its own high-bandwidth memory, or sourced some from within China, and is confident enough to include it on a multi-year roadmap.
As The Register has previously reported, users of Huawei’s existing accelerators have reported results that suggest the parts don’t always perform brilliantly or match claims they are equivalent to kit from the likes of Nvidia and AMD.
- Huawei's battery energy storage systems run out of juice in the UK
- Huawei counts cost of Western bans as UK business withers
- Dodgy Huawei chips nearly sunk DeepSeek's next-gen R2 model
- Beijing doesn't want Nvidia's H20s anywhere near sensitive government workloads
Such comparisons stopped mattering on Wednesday, when China forbade local companies from shopping for American accelerators. Now that Chinese buyers can’t acquire chips from offshore, they’ll have to learn to live with Huawei’s wares.
And so may some of the rest of us, because China’s clouds continue to target overseas markets and appear to be enjoying considerable success: Tencent Cloud today revealed that its overseas client base has doubled since last year.
Also today, Huawei made it easy for its compatriots to deploy Ascend accelerators by announcing a pair of “SuperPoD” rigs that can run 8,192 and 15,488 Ascend units apiece, plus “superclusters” that combine multiple SuperPoDs and scale to 500,000 and “over one million” Ascend parts.
If the likes of Tencent Cloud do the patriotic thing and deploy Huawei’s clusters outside China, accelerators from Huawei and other Middle Kingdom firms will become available to organizations around the world and create competition for US chipmakers.
China’s tech export playbook typically sees its vendors develop strong products that undercut established rivals on price, a strategy that came undone once national security organizations got a close look at Huawei’s and ZTE’s telecoms kit and the people who installed it. Denied access to the West, Beijing now targets developing nations in which price matters, scrutiny may be lighter, and AI hardware from Nvidia and AMD is even more terrifyingly expensive than it is elsewhere. ®
