Huawei's next-generation chip Ascend 960 release date moved up by 9 months, 4,096-card supernode debuts with NPO

Beating AI News Flash: Huawei has moved up the launch of its next-generation Ascend 960 by 9 months. Last year's official plan was still for a Q4 2027 release, but today Huawei announced that the Ascend 960DT will be ready in Q1 2027, three quarters earlier; the 960PR will follow in Q3.

The 960DT single chip delivers 2 PFLOPS FP8 and 4 PFLOPS FP4 compute power, with up to 288GB HBM and 9.6TB/s bandwidth.

Huawei also unveiled a new Ascend 960 supernode, where a single system can connect 4,096 NPUs, providing 8 EFLOPS FP8 compute power and 1PB HBM. It adopts NPO (placing the optical engine near the chip) technology for the first time, using 5,500 Hi-ONE units to replace about 48,000 800G optical modules in the original solution. Huawei claims this can reduce power consumption by more than 550 kilowatts.

Huawei will continue to maintain one Ascend generation per year going forward, while using Lingqu and optical interconnect to further scale up supernodes and push system-level compute power beyond just single chips.