Huawei has undergone major development in the AI chip industry for the past two years, using its Ascend family. But the company is now aiming for big wins! In the next three years, the Chinese OEM targets a dynamic AI semiconductor empire.
Unlike big tech competitors like Nvidia and TSMC that boost their chip-manufacturing by using advanced technologies, Huawei has relied upon basic components and has come so far in this journey. One of these factors is the computing power.
With the help of computing power, Huawei AI chip development reached certain heights amid constant challenges from the US. It says – “we’ll keep evolving Ascend chips to strengthen the base of AI computing power both in China and worldwide.
As of now, Huawei has set bigger plans for the next three years. The OEM will work on three new series of Ascend chips: Ascend 950, Ascend 960, and Ascend 970.
The first one is the Ascend 950 series, which includes the 950PR and the Ascend 950DT. One of them has already made it debuts in the market with Atlas 350.
Details reveal that the former will help with prefill and recommendations. Whereas the latter is designed for decoding and training. Both will use the same die structure as the Ascend 950.
Here, the Ascend 950DT will work on two scenarios: the decode stage of inference and model training. It integrates HiZQ 2.0 HBM that delivers 144GB and 4TB/s memory access bandwidth, fulfilling the requirements of both interconnect bandwidth and memory access bandwidth. Ascend 950DT provides:
- 144GB of memory
- 4TB/s memory access bandwidth
- 2TB/s interconnect bandwidth
- Supports FP8, MXFP8, XMFp4, and HiF8
Release Time: Huawei has just unveiled the Ascend 950PR, just on time as announced in September 2025. And the Ascend 950DT is scheduled for Q4 2026.
2027 – the next year will show Ascend 960 on the stage with twice the computing power, memory access bandwidth, memory capacity, and more interconnect ports. It will significantly elevate training + inference performance of models.
Ascend 960 will further support HiF4 data format to optimize 4-bit precision and deliver greater precision than other FP4 solutions on the market.
Huawei Ascend 970 series will enter the market in the fourth quarter of 2028. It currently plans to double the computing power in FP4 and FP8, double its interconnect bandwidth, and increase its memory access by at least 1.5 times.
It would be interesting to see how well these three years prove to be for Huawei!
The post Huawei AI Chip: Three years, Three major AI chip development appeared first on Huawei Central.
