Huawei reveals giant new AI chip cluster as Nvidia’s China issues rise

BEIJING — Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei announced Thursday new computing systems for powering artificial intelligence with its in-house Ascend chips, as it steps up pressure on U.S. rival Nvidia.

The company said it plans to launch its new “Atlas 950 SuperCluster” as soon as next year.

The U.S. has sought to cut China off from the most advanced semiconductors for training AI models. To cope, Chinese companies have turned more to grouping large numbers of less efficient, often homegrown, chips together to achieve similar computing capabilities.

Huawei announced it would roll out three new versions of its Ascend chips through the end of 2028, with the aim to “double compute” capabilities with each year’s release.

The chips form the basis of Huawei’s AI computing infrastructure, in which a supercluster is connected to multiple superpods, which, in turn, are built from multiple supernodes. Supernodes, which form the base, are built on Ascend chips, using system design to overcome technical limitations imposed by U.S. sanctions.

Huawei said its new Atlas 950 supernode would support 8,192 Ascend chips, and that the Atlas 950 SuperCluster would use more than 500,000 chips.

A more advanced Atlas 960 version, slated for launch in 2027, would support 15,488 Ascend chips per node. The full supercluster would have more than 1 million Ascend chips, according to Huawei.

It was not immediately clear how the systems compared with those powered by Nvidia chips. Huawei claimed in a press release that the new supernodes would be the world’s most powerful by computing power for several years.

In a speech Thursday, Eric Xu, vice chairman and rotating chairman of Huawei, claimed that its forthcoming Atlas 950 supernode would deliver 6.7 times more computing power than Nvidia’s NVL144 system, also planned for launch next year.

Xu even predicted that Huawei’s product would “be ahead on all fronts” compared with another Nvidia system planned for launch in 2027 — and claimed the Atlas 950 supercluster would have 1.3 times the computing power of Elon Musk’s xAI Colossus supercomputer.

“Huawei’s announcement on its computing breakthrough is well timed with recent increasing emphasis by the Chinese government on self-reliance on China’s own chip technologies,” said George Chen, partner and co-chair, digital practice, The Asia Group.

While he cautioned that Huawei might exaggerate its technical capabilities, Chen pointed out that the Chinese company’s ambition to be a world AI leader “cannot be underestimated.”

Research firm SemiAnalysis found in April that Huawei’s self-developed CloudMatrix system was able to perform better than Nvidia’s — despite each Ascend chip delivering only about one-third the performance of an Nvidia…