Huawei pulls its Ascend 960DT chip forward to early 2027 a week before Trump meets Xi
The company also unveiled a Peerium Computing Architecture meant to link up to 256,000 accelerator cards into one system for training and inference.
Huawei said on Thursday at its Huawei Connect conference that its next-generation Ascend 960DT AI chip will be ready in the first quarter of 2027, two quarters earlier than the previously planned third-quarter launch. A spokesperson told TechCrunch that Ascend 960 chips are launching ahead of schedule, doubling performance and advancing year by year, and that David Wang, the company's rotating and acting chairman, announced the updated timeline. The move comes a week before President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are due to meet in Washington on September 24, a meeting at which AI is expected to be on the agenda. Huawei is trying to turn hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of AI chips into one giant computer under what it calls the Peerium Computing Architecture. It relies on UnifiedBus, Huawei's technology for linking processors with memory, storage and networking hardware. Rotating chairman Eric Xu said the company is using the architecture to build larger systems for both training and inference. The Atlas 950 SuperPoD and SuperCluster are the first products built on it, and Huawei says a SuperCluster can connect up to 256,000 accelerator cards. The accelerated timeline signals Huawei's intent to narrow the gap with Nvidia in a market shaped by export controls.