Technology
Huawei pulls Ascend 960 launch forward by three quarters, unveils NPO-based Atlas 960E SuperPoD
Huawei used its Huawei Connect 2026 event in Shanghai to unveil the Atlas 960E SuperPoD, the first SuperPoD built around near-packaged optics, scaling to 4,096 NPUs and 8 EFLOPS at FP8 with up to a petabyte of HBM per pod. The company also accelerated its Ascend roadmap: the Ascend 960DT now ships in Q1 2027, three quarters ahead of schedule, with the Ascend 960PR following in Q3 2027, and confirmed an Ascend 970 in 2028 and Ascend 980 in 2029. Rotating chairman Eric Xu said Huawei holds a bigger AI chip share inside China than Nvidia but cannot yet meet demand.