Huawei set out the next steps of its Ascend AI chip roadmap on September 17, 2026, in the opening keynote of Huawei Connect 2026 in Shanghai, according to the company’s keynote summary. Deputy Chairman and Rotating Chairman David Wang said development of the Ascend 960 “has exceeded the company’s expectations, with performance doubling as planned,” and gave dates for two Ascend 960 variants and the two generations after it.
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The Ascend timeline
| Chip | Timing Huawei gave | Huawei’s note |
|---|---|---|
| Ascend 960DT | Q1 2027 | “three quarters ahead of the company’s original roadmap” |
| Ascend 960PR | Q3 2027 | “one quarter ahead of schedule” |
| Ascend 970 | 2028 | — |
| Ascend 980 | 2029 | — |
Atlas 960E SuperPoD
Huawei says it has used Ascend 960 chips and its Hi-ONE technology to build “the industry’s first NPO-based SuperPoDs,” the Atlas 960E. According to the keynote summary, “a single Atlas 960E SuperPoD can scale up to 4,096 NPUs, delivering 8 EFLOPS of FP8 compute performance, with up to 1 petabyte of HBM capacity.” The “first” claim is Huawei’s.
On systems already in the field, Huawei said: “To date, over 1,000 Atlas 900 A3 SuperPoDs have been deployed, and Atlas 950 SuperPoD is seeing large-scale commercial use.”
UnifiedBus interconnect
In a separate keynote the same day, Yang Chaobin, Executive Director of the Board and CEO of Huawei’s ICT Business Group, presented a new UnifiedBus computing architecture for SuperPoDs and clusters. Huawei says its UnifiedBus LinkDevice has “176 ports, with 1.6 Tbit/s bandwidth per port, delivering 280 Tbit/s all-optical interconnection.” The company also says the protocol raises interconnect bandwidth “from 100 GB/s level to TB/s level” and cuts round-trip latency from 7 microseconds to 2 microseconds, and that its UBG switch’s fan-out of up to 1,024 can support “a million-NPU SuperCluster.”
What it changes
Huawei’s plan pairs a yearly cadence of new Ascend generations through 2029 with large, tightly linked systems: 4,096 NPUs per Atlas 960E SuperPoD, connected by its own UnifiedBus hardware. By Huawei’s own account, two Ascend 960 variants are running ahead of the original schedule. Huawei’s Ascend chips and SuperPoD systems sit alongside other vendors’ accelerators in our AI accelerator catalog.
