Huawei Plans Two New AI Chips for 2027 Launch as It Challenges Nvidia

Huawei announced it will launch two new artificial-intelligence semiconductors in 2027, with rotating chairman David Wang making the disclosure as the Chinese tech giant accelerates its push into AI computing. The announcement was made at the company's annual summit in Shanghai, where Wang presented the upcoming Ascend 960 chips, set to be commercially available that year.

The Ascend 960 represents a significant step up in scale: Huawei's Atlas 960 supernode configuration is designed to support 15,488 Ascend chips per node, compared with 8,192 chips per node in the currently available Atlas 950. A full Atlas 960 SuperCluster would deploy more than one million Ascend chips in total. Huawei has claimed the forthcoming system would outperform Nvidia's competing platforms planned for the same timeframe.

The move intensifies competition between Huawei and Nvidia in the global AI chip market, particularly inside China, where US export restrictions have constrained Nvidia's sales and pushed major Chinese technology companies including Alibaba and ByteDance toward domestic alternatives. Huawei's growing traction with its Ascend lineup has prompted Nvidia to acknowledge that competition has "undeniably arrived."