Huawei Sets 2027 Launches for Ascend 960DT and 960PR Chips

"Huawei plans to launch the 960DT in the first quarter of 2027 and the Ascend 960PR in the third quarter," rotating chairman David Wang told a company event in Shanghai on Thursday, Reuters reported. TrendForce says the 960DT has been pulled forward three quarters against the earlier roadmap, and the 960PR up one.

Wang put most of the weight on the interconnect. "UnifiedBus technology would be key to Huawei's next generation of large AI computing systems, helping connect large numbers of chips to work together," he said. Huawei has developed 11 semiconductors based on UnifiedBus, and its largest linked systems, which the company calls superclusters, "can support up to 1 million AI processors."

The commercial number Wang led with was distribution: Huawei has shipped more than 1,000 smaller linked systems, called supernodes, to more than 370 customers. TrendForce adds that the Atlas 860 SuperPoD (air-cooled) is scheduled for 2Q27 and the Atlas 960 SuperPoD (liquid-cooled) for 3Q27, with the Ascend 970 slated for 2028 and the 980 for 2029 on what Wang calls a "one-generation-per-year cadence."

The pitch, as InsideAI framed it, is that "UnifiedBus appears to be Huawei's answer to Nvidia's NVLink," a system-scale bid rather than a per-chip fight. It lands into a run of Chinese AI infrastructure stories our chips desk has been tracking this month.