Huawei Ascend

At Huawei Connect 2025, Huawei revealed its Ascend chip roadmap, including the 950, 960, and 970 series for AI and HPC, challenging NVIDIA’s dominance. Despite semiconductor manufacturing challenges, Huawei focuses on domestic design, proprietary tech, and open-source strategies. New Ascend chips promise performance leaps with enhanced interconnects. Huawei’s SuperPoD and SuperCluster strategy, powered by UnifiedBus 2.0 (an open protocol), aims to provide scalable, high-performance computing, expanding into general-purpose computing with Kunpeng 950 processors and TaiShan SuperPod. Huawei claims significant performance advantages over competitors.

The 2025 WAIC features Huawei’s debut of the Atlas 900 A3 SuperPoD, built on the Ascend 384 Super Node. This super-node utilizes advanced bus technology for high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnection between 384 NPUs, addressing communication bottlenecks in large AI clusters. Huawei’s CloudMatrix 384 (CM384) AI cluster, built around Ascend chips, delivers 300 PFLOPs of dense BF16 compute power, reportedly surpassing NVIDIA’s GB200 NVL72. Analysts suggest Huawei’s scaled solution surpasses current market offerings from NVIDIA and AMD.