Huawei Tells Clients Ascend 960DT Runs on Samsung, SK Hynix HBM

Huawei recently told some clients that a large share of its upcoming flagship, Ascend 960DT, will run largely on HBM made by Samsung and SK Hynix, per The Information. The chip's launch has been pulled in to Q1 2027, three quarters earlier than the Q4 2027 timeline Huawei previously announced, with the 960PR to follow in Q3 2027.

A single 960DT card is specced at 2 PFLOPS of FP8, 4 PFLOPS of FP4, 288GB of on-chip HBM and 9.6 TB/s of memory bandwidth.

The awkward part is where the memory comes from. US controls that took effect in December 2024 prohibit selling advanced HBM to any customer in China, and the US Bureau of Industry and Security has issued guidance that any use of Huawei's Ascend AI chips violates U.S. export controls. The Information attributes the Ascend 960DT HBM disclosure to Huawei's own messaging to its clients.

A policy analysis from AI Frontiers argues Korean HBM has been reaching Huawei despite those rules: 'Samsung, due to their failures in entering the accelerator supply chain for Western chips, sold their product to Chinese customers that funneled this inventory to Huawei,' with Samsung directly providing 11.4 million stacks of HBM to China, including 7 million stacks in the one-month gap between controls being announced and enforced. The same piece names two Samsung distributors, CoAsia and Faraday, as allegedly engaged in smuggling HBM to China.

The disclosure slots into a long run of Korean-HBM-into-China coverage on our chips tracker.