Huawei's Ascend 960 AI Chip to Launch Ahead of Schedule with Doubled Performance

At Huawei Connect 2026 on September 17, Huawei Rotating Chairman Wang Tao said the Ascend 960 chip is ready ahead of schedule, delivering doubled performance. The Ascend 960DT will launch in Q1 2027, three quarters earlier than originally planned, while the Ascend 960PR is expected in Q3 2027, one quarter ahead of plan.

Wang also outlined the company's annual upgrade roadmap: the Ascend 970 is slated for 2028, and the Ascend 980 for 2029. Previously, the Ascend 960 was expected to debut in Q4 2027.

At Huawei Connect 2025, the company detailed the Ascend 950 architecture, featuring support for low-precision data formats, enhanced vector compute, 2.5x interconnect bandwidth, and Huawei's self-developed HBM. The 950PR variant improves inference prefill and recommendation workloads with HiBL 1.0 HBM, while the 950DT targets inference decode and training performance with increased memory capacity and bandwidth.