Huawei Launches New AI Chips and Takes Aim at Nvidia’s Dominance in China

TLDR

• Huawei says demand for its AI chips outstrips supply in China, limiting overseas sales
• The Ascend 950DT chip is in testing and AI developers are expected to train models on it next year
• Huawei’s next-gen Ascend 960DT chip has been moved up to Q1 2027, three quarters ahead of schedule
• A new computing architecture called Peerium aims to connect up to 1 million processors as one system
• Huawei claims its Ascend chips now hold a larger market share in China than Nvidia

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Huawei says it cannot make enough AI chips to meet demand inside China, and as a result it has no plans to expand sales internationally in any major way. Rotating chairman Eric Xu made the comments at the company’s annual Huawei Connect conference in Shanghai on Thursday.

JUST IN: 🇨🇳 Chinese giant Huawei launches new chip tech to challenge Nvidia $NVDA.

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Xu said Huawei does supply a small number of overseas markets where demand is strong, but volumes are low. The focus right now is meeting domestic demand first.

Ascend 960DT Arrives Earlier Than Planned

Huawei has pulled forward the release of its Ascend 960DT chip to the first quarter of 2027. That is three quarters ahead of the original schedule. The Ascend 960PR will follow in Q3 2027, one quarter early.

The company plans to release a new generation of Ascend chips every year. The Ascend 970 and 980 are targeted for 2028 and 2029.

Huawei also introduced the Atlas 960 SuperPoD computing cluster at the conference. It is a faster version of the Atlas 950 SuperPod launched just months ago, with improvements in both AI training and inference.

Xu said the Ascend 950DT chip has produced good results in testing. He expects Chinese AI model developers to begin training on systems using the chip next year. More than 40 AI models have already been trained on Huawei’s computing platform, and over 5,200 developers are active monthly on Ascend chip software.

Huawei Pushes for Full Chip Self-Sufficiency

Xu was direct about why Huawei is pushing so hard on chips. US export controls have restricted China’s access to Nvidia’s most advanced chips since 2019. Huawei has faced its own US trade restrictions since May of that year.

“We cannot accept a destiny where we cannot control our fate being determined by others in terms of willingness to sell chips to China or not,” Xu said.

Huawei is also trying to work around limits on individual chip performance by linking large numbers of processors together. Clusters of around 100,000 chips have become standard for training large AI models.

The company unveiled a new architecture called Peerium, designed to eventually connect up to 1 million processors as a single system. Its UnifiedBus technology links processors, memory, storage and networking inside those systems.

Huawei said its Ascend 960 supernode can connect up to 4,096 processors. Multiple supernodes can then be joined into larger clusters.

More than 1,000 systems using the earlier Ascend 910C processors have already been deployed. The Ascend 950 systems have entered commercial use.

Nvidia still holds a major software advantage through its CUDA platform, which developers rely on to build and run AI applications. Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment.

Huawei’s announcements came less than two weeks before a planned meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington on September 24.