Huawei moves up Ascend 960DT chip launch to early 2027 in Nvidia race

Huawei is moving up the launch of its next-generation Ascend 960DT chip, an AI processor built to rival Nvidia’s, to the first quarter of 2027, two quarters earlier than planned. The Chinese technology company confirmed the change on Thursday at its Huawei Connect conference, according to a spokesperson who spoke with TechCrunch.

The chip had been set for a third-quarter 2027 release. “The Ascend 960DT is expected to be ready in Q1 2027. Ascend 960 chips are launching ahead of schedule, doubling performance and advancing year by year,” the spokesperson said. David Wang, Huawei’s rotating and acting chairman, announced the revised timeline at the conference.

Huawei is also pitching a broader system design it calls Peerium Computing Architecture, a way of linking hundreds of thousands of AI chips into a single large computer. The approach relies on UnifiedBus, Huawei’s technology for connecting processors to memory, storage and networking hardware. Eric Xu, Huawei’s rotating chairman, said the architecture is meant to support both training new AI models and running them, known as inference. The company’s Atlas 950 SuperPoD and SuperCluster, computing clusters built from many linked chips, are the first systems using the design. Huawei says an Atlas 950 SuperCluster can connect up to 256,000 accelerator cards.

A smaller cluster than promised

The faster chip timeline came with a discrepancy in Huawei’s cluster claims. China tech analyst Rui Ma pointed out on X that Huawei had previously said its Atlas 960 SuperPoD would scale to 15,488 Ascend 960 chips, while this week’s announcement described a system built around 4,096 chips. “The chip itself is coming WAY earlier, but the SuperPoD they announced is much smaller than what they originally laid out,” Ma wrote. Huawei did not address the gap in its statement to TechCrunch.

The announcement lands a week before U.S. President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are due to meet in Washington on September 24. Huawei has kept advancing its chip plans despite U.S. restrictions on China’s access to advanced semiconductor technology. Ma said those restrictions are unlikely to stop China from building its own chip industry, writing that “the stakes for self-sufficiency are just too high at this point.” Trump has resisted calls from AI industry figures to slow AI development over safety concerns, arguing the U.S. must keep its lead over China. Eric Xu, meanwhile, argued that Chinese companies need to advance further before they can fully understand and address the risks of more powerful AI systems, according to the Financial Times.

What to watch next: whether Huawei clarifies the difference between its earlier 15,488-chip SuperPoD claim and this week’s 4,096-chip system, and whether the accelerated Ascend 960DT timeline holds once the chip nears its new first-quarter 2027 target.