Huawei Unveils Ascend 960 Chips and SuperPoD Stack Aiming at Million-Card Clusters
智东西 · wechat · 2026-09-17
At Huawei Connect 2026, Huawei unveiled a full AI infrastructure stack built on its UnifiedBus interconnect:
- Ascend 960DT ahead of schedule: 2 PFLOPS FP8 / 4 PFLOPS FP4, double last-gen performance, 288GB HBM at 9.6TB/s, ready Q1 2027; 970 and 980 to follow annually in 2028–29.
- Ascend 960 SuperPoD: first NPO-based supernode — 4,096 cards, 8 EFLOPS FP8, 1PB HBM, 99.8% availability — paired with the world's first mass-produced 7.2Tbps NPO optical engine (Hi-ONE).
- Kunpeng SuperPoD: 4,096 nodes, 256TB unified memory pool, 30× faster agent sandbox startup, 300K TPS vector search.
- OceanStor M900: KV Cache in one hop, >50% lower latency, 16× SSD lifespan.
- Networking: UnifiedBus + two-layer CLOS supports up to 512K Ascend 960 cards and million-processor clusters; 10K-card cluster MFU raised from 20% to 35%.
CANN now has 5,000+ monthly active developers (61% external); Kunpeng ecosystem exceeds 4.16M developers. Huawei also outlined on-device AI plans: 30B Pangu MoE shipping on Mate X2,端侧 models potentially reaching 70–100B by 2030.
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