Huawei unveiled a new AI chip roadmap at the Huawei Connect 2026 trade fair in Shanghai, introducing the Ascend 960 and its successors. The Ascend 960, featuring 288 GByte of HBM, is set for Q1 2027, followed by the FP4-focused Ascend 960PR in Q3 2027.
The roadmap extends into 2029 with the newly announced Ascend 980, which aims to double the performance of the 2028 Ascend 970. Development for the 980 focuses on advanced interconnects for data exchange, utilizing optical connections for hardware scaling.
These advancements support Huawei's PoD and SuperPoD rack architectures for supercomputing. By accelerating its release schedule, Huawei aims to enhance accelerator performance through 2029, while a 2026 blind test recently evaluated nine mobile devices.