7 posts tagged with "Ascend"

August 23-25, 2026, the 38th Hot Chips (HC38) was held at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium. As the bellwether of global high-performance chip architecture, this conference landed exactly at the most intense moment of the AI compute arms race — the official agenda had 48 entries, including 7 AI accelerators, 6 memory tutorials, 6 CPUs, and 4 each of GPUs and networking. Putting the vendor talks together, one consensus emerged: the unit of AI compute competition has shifted from "single chip" to "whole rack / entire system."

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1. Overview: Three Days of Agenda, Almost a Preview of the 2027 AI Rack Market​

Monday (8/24) afternoon's GPU session was the focus, with four talks nearly colliding as the 2027 AI rack market:

• NVIDIA Rubin GPU ("Driving the Era of Agentic AI"): First chiplet-architecture GPU, 288GB HBM4, ~50 PFLOPS FP4, paired with 88-core Arm-architecture Vera CPU into NVL72 / NVL144 racks, mass production in H2 2026.
• AMD Instinct MI400 (two talks: architecture + system architecture): Told the "rack-scale" story thoroughly.
• Intel Crescent Island: A 350W air-cooled card designed for Agentic AI inference.

Tuesday (8/25) afternoon's AI session was almost a parade of "hyperscalers de-NVIDIA-izing": Google's 8th-gen TPU, OpenAI's first custom chip, Microsoft Maia 200, Meta MTIA, and Cerebras wafer-scale rack all appeared together.

Every vendor on stage used the term "Agentic AI" within the first two PPT slides — not a coincidence, but the collective shift in 2026 AI workload design goals.

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2. NVIDIA Rubin: One Rack Is a Supercomputer​

What NVIDIA featured at Hot Chips was not a single GPU but the Vera Rubin NVL72 whole cabinet — 72 Rubin GPUs + 36 Vera CPUs, 18 compute trays + 9 NVLink switch trays, about 1.3 million components, nearly 1,300 chips, weighing about 4,000 pounds (~1.8 tons).

The single Rubin GPU specs are equally stunning:

Metric	Rubin GPU	vs Blackwell
Transistors	336 billion (TSMC 3nm dual-die)	208 billion (+61.5%)
Memory	288GB HBM4	—
Bandwidth	22 TB/s	2.8× Blackwell
NVFP4 inference	50 PFLOPS	5× GB200
Training compute	35 PFLOPS	3.5×

The most disruptive design is in the compute tray: no cables, no hoses, no fans, all interconnected via the PCB backplane. NVIDIA says assembly time dropped from nearly 2 hours to 5 minutes (20× faster) while improving maintainability.

This time NVIDIA is selling not FLOPS but tokens per megawatt. Citing a SemiAnalysis benchmark based on DeepSeek-v4-PRO (140K+ context, AgentX workload), it claims: versus GB300 NVL72, Vera Rubin NVL72 delivers 10× to up to 30× tokens/MW as interaction intensity rises. A single cabinet provides 3.6 EFLOPS inference compute, whole-cabinet power 190-230kW; long-term capacity target is 1,000 NVL72 cabinets per day.

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3. AMD MI455X + Helios: Bigger Memory and Open Interconnect​

AMD's answer is the MI455X + Helios rack going head-to-head with NVIDIA. MI455X uses CDNA 5 architecture, 8 N2-process accelerator dies + N3P-process interconnect die, 256 workgroup processors, 192MB global L2.

Metric	MI455X	vs Rubin
Memory	432GB HBM4 (12-layer stack)	50% higher than Rubin's 288GB
Bandwidth	23.3 TB/s	Slightly ahead
MXFP4 compute	40.26 PFLOPS	—
System (Helios 72 cards)	2.9 ExaFLOPS FP4 inference	—
Price	~$5.25M per cabinet	—

At the system level, AMD bets on the UALoE (Ultra Accelerator Link over Ethernet) open standard: each GPU provides 3.6 TB/s bidirectional interconnect bandwidth; two 512-port 200G UALoE switch chips in the switch tray total 10.8 TB/s — opening the interconnect protocol to the whole industry while targeting NVLink.

Production cadence: AMD plans to deliver engineering samples and small-batch systems in H2 2026, with large-scale ramp in Q2 2027. Earlier rumors of Helios delay due to cooling issues were not confirmed by AMD.

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4. Intel Crescent Island: The Air-Cooled, Large-Memory "Cost-Effective Oddball"​

Intel offers a completely different path: Crescent Island — a 350W, air-cooled, standard-PCIe-slot inference GPU designed for Agentic AI, with the key metric being tokens per watt.

Metric	Crescent Island	Note
Architecture	Xe3P, 32 Xe cores, 32MB unified L2	Disclosed at Hot Chips
Memory	Intel branded card 160GB / ODM up to 480GB LPDDR5X	More than Rubin's 288GB HBM4
Form factor	350W air-cooled PCIe	Plugs into standard racks, no liquid-cooling retrofit
RAS	ECC, dynamic page offline, hard-package repair, PCIe advanced error reporting	Addresses "silent data corruption"

Intel's logic is clear: inference scenarios need far more memory capacity than bandwidth; using low-cost LPDDR5X for capacity and air cooling to skip liquid-cooling infrastructure drives down per-token cost. Combined with Diamond Rapids Xeon (256 performance cores, 1.28GB cache, 128 PCIe Gen6 lanes), Intel tries to surround from edge to datacenter with "CPU + inference GPU + open software stack."

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5. Custom ASIC Parade: Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta Together​

Tuesday afternoon's AI session was the most historic of the conference — a parade of "hyperscalers de-NVIDIA-izing":

Chip	Vendor / Partner	Positioning	Key Specs / Progress
TPU 8t (Sunfish)	Google × Broadcom	Training	9,600 cards per pod, 121 FP4 ExaFLOPS, 2PB shared HBM
TPU 8i (Zebrafish)	Google × MediaTek	Inference	288GB HBM, 384MB on-chip SRAM (3× prev gen), ICI 19.2 Tb/s
Jalapeño	OpenAI × Broadcom	Inference	9-month end-to-end design, target ~50% token cost cut, commercial end of 2026
Maia 200	Microsoft (TSMC 3nm)	Inference	140B+ transistors, 10+ PFLOPS FP4, 216GB HBM3E, serving GPT-5.2 at Des Moines datacenter
MTIA 300-500	Meta (RISC-V) × Broadcom	Training + inference	Up to 25× compute gain, one model every 6 months before 2027

Google split TPU into training (8t) and inference (8i) dedicated architectures for the first time — its biggest architectural shift in a decade. Norm Jouppi personally took the stage to present TPU v8.

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6. Two Hidden Threads — Memory and Networking: HBM4 Year 1 + AI Factory OS​

Beyond GPUs/ASICs, two hidden threads mattered equally:

• Memory: Samsung's HBM Base Die (logic-process base die) and SK hynix's advanced packaging appeared together; the HBM4-era "base-die foundry" industry shift begins; HBF (high-bandwidth flash), LPDDR5X-PIM, 3D DRAM, and CXL compute-storage showcased "compute-in-memory" moving from papers to products.
• Networking: NVIDIA BlueField-4 (DPU) and Spectrum-X Multiplane architecture (presented by Gilad Shainer) — networking is becoming the decisive architecture for gigascale AI, scaling from hundreds of thousands to a million cards; Broadcom Thor Ultra Ethernet NIC keeps pressing; Mojo Vision showed chip-level optical I/O.

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7. Three Routes, One Consensus​

At the same conference, three vendors offered three distinctly different AI compute delivery philosophies:

1. NVIDIA: Full-stack closed integration — GPU, CPU, DPU, and switch chips all self-designed, pushing system performance to the extreme via ultimate software-hardware co-design, at the cost of deep customer lock-in.
2. AMD: Open-standard catch-up — Uses larger HBM4 capacity + UALoE open interconnect for a "cost-effective + open" play, tearing open the inference gap with Meta and OpenAI's 12GW-class orders.
3. Intel: Air-cooled cost-effectiveness — Abandons liquid cooling and HBM, uses LPDDR5X large memory + standard PCIe, betting that "most inference doesn't need a 200kW rack."

But all three agree: the unit of competition is no longer the chip, but the co-designed system (rack / system). For buyers, 2027 compute planning should compare not "single-card PFLOPS" but "tokens per megawatt, latency, availability, and full-lifecycle cost."

Related Links​

• NVIDIA Rubin spec page
• AMD MI455X spec page
• Intel Crescent Island spec page
• Google TPU 8t spec page
• Google TPU 8i spec page

References​

• Hot Chips 2026 Three Giants Together: Rubin 336B Transistors, MI455X 432GB, Crescent Island 480GB - IC Chip Industry Watch
• Hot Chips Day 2: Rubin, MI400 and Diamond Rapids Go Head-to-Head - AI2Work
• NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 Rack at Hot Chips 2026 - ServeTheHome
• Hot Chips 2026: 4 Hyperscalers Put Custom AI Silicon on One Afternoon - Sean Kim

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This article is compiled from Hot Chips 2026 (Aug 23-25) official presentations and on-site reports from ServeTheHome, SemiAnalysis, TechPowerUp, etc. Performance data are vendor-disclosed figures; actual performance subject to mass-produced products.

In 2026, China's AI chip market landscape has shifted from "NVIDIA unipolar dominance" to "overseas vendors leading, domestic multi-route catch-up." According to industry research, China's overall AI accelerator market was ~4M units in 2025, of which 1.65M were domestic, with share first breaking 40%; as products iterate and fabs follow up, the localization rate is expected to rise to 60%-70% by 2027. This article focuses on the latest H2 2026 progress of Huawei Ascend, Cambricon, and Moore Threads — the domestic "Big Three."

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1. Huawei Ascend: 950 Capacity Fully Booked, 960 Roadmap Unveiled​

Ascend's core advantage is "architecture + full-stack ecosystem synergy," with ~800K units shipped in 2025, capturing 50% of the total domestic vendor share. The product iteration cadence is clear:

Time	Product	Note
2025 Q1	Ascend 910C	Main transitional model
2026 Q1	Ascend 950PR	Inference flagship
2026 Q4 (planned)	Ascend 950DT	Training flagship, drives domestic HBM iteration
2027-2028	Ascend 960 / 970	Roadmap products

950 series capacity has entered a "fully booked" state: 950PR entered mass production in April 2026; June monthly capacity jumped to 500K-600K units (nearly 10x MoM), with a full-year target of 1.2M units at 100% certainty; ByteDance locked in 350K units for $5.6B, while Tencent / Alibaba / Baidu combined locked in 400K units.

Ascend 960 roadmap specs (per roadmap disclosure):

Metric	Ascend 960
Architecture	Ascend 6th gen (Da Vinci v6)
FP8 compute	~4 PFLOPS
Memory	288GB
Memory bandwidth	9.6 TB/s
Super-node	Atlas 960 SuperPoD, 15,488 cards, Lingqu optical-electrical converged bus
Debut	2027 Q4 (roadmap)

The previous-gen Ascend 384 super-node has cumulatively shipped over 750 sets, deployed across 20+ industries including internet, operators, finance, education, and healthcare — Huawei calls it "the only domestic super-node that has trained a SOTA model."

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2. Cambricon MLU690: H2 Mass Production, Entering ByteDance Bidding Window​

Cambricon is the core domestic compute leader in the absence of an Ascend IPO, with the technology gap continuously narrowing:

• Siyuan 590 (7nm): Performance equivalent to 80% of A100, already supports DeepSeek, continuously adapting to mainstream large models like Qwen 3 and GLM
• Siyuan 690 series: Will enter mass production in H2 2026, expected to achieve order scale-up during ByteDance's H2 bidding window
• Revenue certainty: Equity incentive targets show >100% revenue growth for the next 3 years: 2026 revenue target 13.5B RMB, 2027 27B RMB, 2028 60B RMB

Cambricon fully benefits from the industry dividend of "domestic CSP capex + full adaptation of domestic large models and domestic chips," making it the most direct elasticity play on rising localization rate.

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3. Moore Threads MTT S5000: Full-Function GPU + Ecosystem Breakthrough​

Moore Threads takes a differentiated "full-function GPU" route, with the flagship MTT S5000 based on the 4th-gen "Pinghu" MUSA architecture:

Metric	MTT S5000
Dense AI compute	1000 TFLOPS
Memory	80GB
Memory bandwidth	1.6 TB/s
Inter-card interconnect	784 GB/s
Precision	FP8 to FP64 full precision (training + inference)
Security	First batch to pass national "Safe and Reliable Evaluation" (Level I)

Its engineering capability is verified: the Kuae (KUAE) intelligent computing cluster based on S5000 achieves 95% training linear scaling efficiency, with compute efficiency loss within 5% at ten-thousand-card scale; supports checkpoint-resume training with effective training time ratio >90%; and has trained a MoE-236B base model with >25 trillion tokens of corpus from scratch.

The ecosystem is Moore Threads' deepest moat: MUSA has achieved 100% core math library compatibility, 3000+ PyTorch operator compatibility, covers 55 categories of core AI operators, has official vLLM and SGLang support, Day-0 adaptation of mainstream models, and 800K+ developers. Its PD heterogeneous-disaggregation solution achieves equivalent replacement of international high-end GPUs at a 2:1 ratio with S5000, significantly reducing inference cost.

The 5th-gen "Huagang" architecture (released 2025-12) supports FP4 to FP64 full precision, with 50% higher compute density and 10x better energy efficiency than the previous gen, supporting 100K+ card clusters; cumulative R&D investment in the "Huashan" (train-infer integrated) and "Lushan" (graphics rendering) new chips based on this architecture exceeds 900M RMB.

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4. Software Ecosystem Decides: Day-0 Adaptation Becomes Routine​

Beyond hardware, software ecosystem realization is the watershed for domestic compute in 2026:

• Huawei's CANN heterogeneous computing architecture and MindSeries suite are fully open-sourced, with the community incubating 67 projects, 12.44M+ lines of code, and 3,500+ monthly active developers
• The "release-and-adapt" closed loop between domestic large models and domestic chips has basically formed: Tencent Hunyuan T3 (295B), DeepSeek-V4, and GLM-5.2 all completed Day-0 adaptation
• 2026 is regarded as the "first year of domestic super-nodes"; Huatai Securities estimates China's super-node architecture market will reach 341.4B RMB by 2028, with a 2026-2028 CAGR of 194%

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5. Industry Judgment: From "Can It Be Built" to "Can It Be Used Well"​

The domestic Big Three are converging along three paths:

1. Huawei: Locks government/enterprise and internet big customers with super-node system-level capability + full-stack software
2. Cambricon: Impacts the revenue inflection point by narrowing the training-side gap + scaling up via big-customer bidding
3. Moore Threads: Covers cloud-edge-end full scenarios with full-function GPU generality + mature CUDA-compatible ecosystem

The common shortcoming of all three remains advanced process and HBM supply — precisely the core link of overseas controls. But as domestic HBM iterates and fabs follow up, a realistic path to 60%-70% localization by 2027 exists.

Related Links​

• Huawei Ascend 960 spec page
• Huawei Ascend 950DT spec page
• Cambricon MLU690 spec page
• Moore Threads MTT S5000 spec page

References​

• Domestic AI Chip Industry View Update - Robo Datayes
• Moore Threads, Two Positives in One Day - Eastmoney
• Moore Threads × SiliconFlow: PD Disaggregation Heterogeneous Compute Co-location Whitepaper - EE Focus
• After Approaching Break-even, Moore Threads Faces Hong Kong "Big Exam" Again - Top News

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This article is compiled from public industry research, broker views, and corporate announcements as of August 2026. Some shipment and market-share figures are third-party estimates, not officially confirmed data.

The 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) was held July 17-20, 2026 at the Shanghai World Expo Center, themed "Intelligent Partners, Creating the Future Together." Over 1,100 companies showcased 3,000+ exhibits, with 300+ products debuting globally. For the compute-card industry, this concentrated review of domestic compute sent a clear signal: the competitive main line is shifting from "single-chip peak compute" to "SuperNode system-level effective compute."

1. Huawei Atlas 950 SuperPoD: live debut, wins SAIL grand award​

Huawei's Atlas 950 SuperPoD live hardware made its first public appearance at WAIC 2026, on-site carrying 16 compute cabinets with 1,024 Ascend cards total. With three system-level innovations — "ultra-wide bandwidth, ultra-low latency, unified memory addressing" — it stood out from hundreds of domestic and international entries to win the conference's top honor, the SAIL (Super AI Leader) Award.

Core parameters (confirmed on-site at WAIC)​

Metric	Atlas 950 SuperPoD
Exhibited scale	16 compute cabinets / 1,024 Ascend cards
Max interconnect scale	8,192 Ascend NPU cards fully interconnected (full config)
Interconnect protocol	Huawei in-house "Lingqu" (UnifiedBus) 2.0
Total compute	1 EFLOPS FP8 / 2 EFLOPS FP4 (1,024 cards); full 8,192-card ~8 EFLOPS FP8
Unified memory	256 TB globally unified memory address space
Interconnect latency	3 μs ultra-low RTT; TB-level NPU interconnect bandwidth
Full config	128 compute cabinets + 32 interconnect cabinets = 160 cabinets, ~1000㎡, carrying 8,192 Ascend 950DT
Launch	Full config planned for Q4 2026
Cooling	Fully liquid-cooled blind-plug architecture

Huawei disclosed for the first time: the previous-gen Ascend 384 SuperNode has cumulatively shipped 750+ units commercially, deployed across 20+ industries including internet, operators, finance, education, healthcare, transportation, and manufacturing, calling it "the only domestic SuperNode that has trained SOTA models."

2. Software ecosystem: CANN fully open-sourced, developers at scale​

Beyond hardware, Huawei highlighted open-source software ecosystem progress:

• CANN heterogeneous compute architecture and MindSeries base software suite were fully open-sourced end of 2025;
• The CANN open-source community has incubated 67 projects, 12.44M+ lines of code, with 3,500+ monthly active developers;
• Huawei has co-developed 7,000+ solutions with 3,000+ industry partners, serving 2,000+ core government/enterprise customers;
• WAIC showcased 60+ real business scenarios, 20+ benchmark cases, covering the full chain from technology breakthrough to scaled commercial deployment.

3. Domestic chips' Day-0 adaptation becomes routine​

On July 6, 2026, Tencent released the MoE model Hunyuan T3 (295B parameters, 256K context); domestic chips rapidly completed Day-0 adaptation:

Vendor	Chip	Adaptation status
Moore Threads	MTT S5000	Completed rapid Hunyuan T3 adaptation (previously adapted DeepSeek-V4, GLM-5.2)
MetaX	Xiyun C series	In-house MXMACA stack first to full-chain Day-0 adaptation, zero-code deployment

Moore Threads also showcased the MTT C256 SuperNode (first-of-its-kind single-layer Scale-up 256-card full interconnect, sub-microsecond latency) and three AI-factory solutions — "model training factory / token production factory / agent production factory."

4. More domestic compute debut highlights​

Vendor / product	Highlight
Orient AlphaChip DF1000	World's first "software-defined + near-memory computing" 3D chip, interconnect pitch compressed to sub-micron
ZhongHao XinYing "Xuyu"	Fully in-house next-gen TPU-architecture AI-specific chip, with Taize 2.0 server
Enflame × Iluvatar	Domestic high-performance Matrix SuperNode based on OEX+dOCS architecture, shortlisted for the conference "Excellent AI Leader Award"
Rongming Microelectronics	Advancing next-gen VPU, evolving from video processing to "visual-agent compute base"

The domestic AI chip lineup also included Moore Threads, MetaX, Enflame, Houmo, Cixiong, Suaneng, SemiDrive, Phytium, Aixin, Iluvatar, and others.

Industry interpretation: from "can it be built" to "is it used well"​

WAIC 2026 reflects a fundamental shift in the competitive stage of domestic AI chips:

1. SuperNode becomes the main battlefield: beyond single-chip performance, system-level capabilities — "inter-chip interconnect + cluster scale + cooling" — become the breakthrough key. Huawei Lingqu and Enflame/Iluvatar OEX are both pushing here. Huatai Securities defines 2026 as the "first year of domestic SuperNodes," estimating China's SuperNode architecture market could reach ¥341.4B by 2028, with 2026-2028 CAGR of 194%.
2. Software ecosystem delivers: Day-0 adaptation has gone from slogan to routine; the "launch-and-adapt" closed loop between domestic large models (DeepSeek-V4, GLM-5.2, Hunyuan T3) and domestic chips is essentially formed.
3. Demand-side endorsement: China Mobile earlier released its 2026-2027 AI SuperNode centralized procurement announcement — about 6,208 cards, over ¥2B — accelerating domestic SuperNode scaled commercialization.

Related links​

• Huawei Ascend 950DT specs
• Huawei Ascend 950PR specs
• Moore Threads MTT S5000 specs

References​

• Ascend 950 SuperNode live at WAIC 2026, wins SAIL top award - Global Times
• 2026 WAIC compute competition enters "system-level" battlefield, Ascend 950 SuperNode debuts - Tencent News
• Huawei unveils advanced Atlas 950 SuperPoD - China Daily
• Huawei Ascend 950 wins WAIC 2026 SAIL top honor - Huxiu
• Compute heavyweights at WAIC: Huawei Ascend 950 SuperNode live - 21st Century Business Herald

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This article is compiled from WAIC 2026 (July 17-20) on-site and official disclosures, and will continuously track the 950 SuperNode Q4 launch.

The Ascend 950 series (950PR inference / 950DT training) has become the core supply of domestic AI compute. Per multiple brokerages and industry research, 950 series capacity is 100% booked with scarce spot supply; the full-year 1.2M-unit target is "100% certain," with expectations of an upward revision to 1.5M. This article summarizes capacity and order data as of July 2026.

1. Capacity pace: ~10× MoM jump in June​

Time	950PR monthly capacity	Notes
May 2026	50k-60k units	Near full production
June 2026	500k-600k units	~10× MoM; SMIC, Hua Hong tier-1 suppliers on overtime
Q3 2026 (est.)	700k-800k units	Per month
Full-year 2026 target	1.2M units	Upward revision to 1.5M expected

Supply chain delivery is tight: high-speed backplanes and liquid-cooling connectors' lead time stretched from 2 weeks to 6-8 weeks; orders are booked into 2027.

2. Order structure: top cloud providers + operators + overseas​

Customer	Locked volume	Amount / Notes
ByteDance	350k 950PR	$5.6B, concentrated delivery from Q3 2026
Tencent / Alibaba / Baidu	~250k 950PR + 150k 950DT	Combined ~400k units
Three major operators	200k+ units	Centralized procurement, for intelligent compute centers and AI private networks
Overseas	South Korea 2,000 units, Malaysia 3,000 servers, Russia ten-thousand-card cluster	From pilot to commercial

3. Shipment forecast: firmly #1 domestic​

Per CCA (Kezhi) Consulting estimates:

Metric	2025	2026 (forecast)
Huawei Ascend total shipments	812k cards	1.026M cards
Of which 950PR	—	~800k units
Of which 950DT	—	~100k-200k units

Huawei has completed the product transition from the 910 series to the 950 series. The internet industry has become Ascend's largest application market; competitive advantage is extending from single-hardware performance to software ecosystem and system capabilities.

4. Going overseas: formal South Korea entry in Q4​

Per Korean media ETNews, Huawei plans Q4 2026 to formally enter the South Korean market with the Ascend series and Atlas 950 SuperPod:

• Local distributor agreements signed; two channel partners including SK Shieldus selected
• Main products: 950PR (mass-produced and delivered since April) and 950DT (launched Q4)
• Official line: 950PR inference performance is 2.87× that of H20, priced at about 1/4 of it

5. WAIC 2026: 1024-card live debut confirmed​

At WAIC 2026 (July 17-20, Shanghai), Huawei's Atlas 950 SuperPoD live hardware made its first public appearance — a 16 compute-cabinet, 1,024 Ascend-card scale — and won the conference's top honor, the SAIL Award:

• Core metrics: total compute 1 EFLOPS FP8 / 2 EFLOPS FP4, 256 TB globally unified memory addressing, Lingqu 2.0 interconnect, 3 μs ultra-low RTT latency
• Full configuration: 128 compute cabinets + 32 interconnect cabinets = 160 cabinets, ~1000㎡ footprint, carrying 8,192 Ascend 950DT, planned Q4 2026 launch
• Commercial foundation: previous-gen 384 SuperNode has cumulatively shipped 750+ units, deployed in 20+ industries
• Software ecosystem: CANN fully open-sourced end of 2025; community incubated 67 projects, 12.44M+ lines of code, 3,500+ monthly active developers

WAIC's debut confirmed the 950 series' "SuperNode-first" product logic: beyond single-card compute, system-level effective compute (interconnect bandwidth + unified memory + low latency) is the key dimension for domestic compute to benchmark against international flagships.

Ascend roadmap recap​

Product	Positioning	Key metrics (official roadmap)
950PR	Inference	1 PFLOPS (FP8) / 2 PFLOPS (FP4), 2 TB/s interconnect
950DT	Training	SuperNode core, launched Q4
960	Train/inference	2 PFLOPS (FP8) / 4 PFLOPS
970	Next-gen	In planning

Industry interpretation​

1. Domestic substitution moves from inference to training: 950PR (inference) ramps first, 950DT (training) follows in Q4, combined with the Atlas 950 SuperPoD ten-thousand-card interconnect — domestic compute now has the complete "training substitution" puzzle for the first time.
2. Capacity is the biggest variable: order certainty is extremely high, but SMIC/Hua Hong advanced-process capacity, HBM supply, and advanced packaging remain ramp bottlenecks — the root of "scarce spot supply."
3. Going overseas opens a second growth curve: bulk procurement from South Korea, Malaysia, Russia, and Latin America marks domestic compute's shift from "internal circulation" to "external circulation."

Related links​

• Huawei Ascend 950PR specs
• Huawei Ascend 950DT specs
• Huawei Ascend 950 specs

References​

• China intelligent-compute chip competitive landscape (CCA data) - IDCquan
• Ascend 950 series capacity and orders - Eastmoney
• WAIC catalyst: Huawei Ascend 950 SuperNode live debut - 10jqka
• Huawei Ascend 950 enters South Korea in Q4: 2.87× H20 inference - Toutiao

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Data in this article is based on official and major brokerage research; capacity/orders are dynamic figures and will be continuously updated.

On June 5, 2026, Shenzhen announced a major piece of news: Shenzhen Hetao College, together with HIT (Shenzhen) and Huawei, used 1,000 Huawei Ascend 910C chips to successfully complete full-parameter post-training of the 1.6-trillion-parameter DeepSeek-V4-Pro large model.

This was no tentative attempt, but a milestone technological breakthrough. It proved with irrefutable engineering results that: domestic AI chips are fully capable of supporting world-class, super-large-parameter model training.

Why this matters​

The two thresholds of AI chips: "inference" and "training"​

• Inference: using an existing model to chat, write copy. Domestic chips could already do this
• Training: adjusting model parameters to learn new capabilities. Full-parameter training adjusts all 1.6 trillion parameters at once — maximum difficulty

Previously, full-parameter training of trillion-scale models was monopolized by NVIDIA H100/H200. Domestic chips could only do inference, not large-scale training.

The significance of this breakthrough: domestic compute leapt from "usable" to "useful", from "inference" to "training".

Technical details​

Training configuration​

Item	Parameter
Chips	Huawei Ascend 910C × 1,000
Model	DeepSeek-V4-Pro
Parameters	1.6 trillion (1600B)
Training type	Full-parameter post-training
Framework	MindSpore + torch_npu
Completed	Announced June 5, 2026

Performance metrics​

Metric	Value	Assessment
Compute utilization	>30%	Industrial grade (top overseas chips ~40%)
Key training operator efficiency	+14%	vs previous-gen 910B
Communication bandwidth utilization	>60% (est.)	MoE All-to-All communication
Stability	1,000 cards trained continuously with no failures	Cluster stability met standard

💡 About 30% compute utilization: many feel 30% is low, but in large-model training this is already a very respectable industrial-grade level. Even with the most advanced overseas chips, many teams' actual utilization is around 40%.

Ascend 910C detailed specs​

Ascend 910C is Huawei's AI training/inference chip announced at the Huawei Analyst Conference (April 24, 2024), with a theoretical peak of 800 TFLOPS (BF16), in the same class as NVIDIA H100.

Parameter	Ascend 910C	Ascend 910B	NVIDIA H100
Architecture	Ascend 910C	Ascend 910B	Hopper
Process	TSMC 7nm (est.)	TSMC 7nm	TSMC 4NP
BF16 compute	800 TFLOPS	256 TFLOPS	989 TFLOPS (sparse)
Memory	64GB HBM (est.)	64GB HBM2e (B1/B2)	80GB HBM3
Memory bandwidth	~2TB/s (est.)	600 GB/s (B1/B2)	3.35 TB/s
TDP	~400W (est.)	300-400W	700W
Mass production	April 2026 (full production)	Nov 2022	Mar 2022

Key upgrades:

• ✅ 3× compute: from 910B's 256 TFLOPS to 800 TFLOPS
• ✅ Mature software ecosystem: torch_npu adapts PyTorch, MindSpore framework mature
• ✅ Cluster stability: 1,000 cards trained continuously with no failures (the biggest breakthrough)

Technical challenges and solutions​

Challenge 1: Memory demand of trillion-scale models​

A 1.6-trillion-parameter model needs, just for model parameters:

• FP16: 1.6T × 2 bytes = 3.2 TB
• Plus gradients and optimizer states: at least 10 TB of memory

Huawei's solution:

• Model Parallel: distribute the model across 1,000 910C chips
• ZeRO optimizer: optimize memory footprint
• Gradient accumulation: update parameters in stages

Challenge 2: Communication efficiency of thousand-card clusters​

Training with 1,000 chips, inter-chip communication becomes the bottleneck. MoE models need All-to-All communication (each expert may need to communicate with all others).

Huawei's solution:

• HCCS (Huawei Collective Communication Scheduler): in-house high-speed interconnect protocol
• Layered communication: intra-node NVLink + inter-node HCCS
• Communication-compute overlap: data transfer concurrent with computation

Challenge 3: Training stability​

Trillion-scale model training takes weeks or months; any single card failure can interrupt the entire training.

Huawei's solution:

• Fault detection and auto-recovery: real-time monitoring of card status, auto-restart and recovery on failure
• Checkpoint optimization: high-frequency training-state saves (every N steps)
• Ascend cluster management software: designed specifically for enterprise training

Competitive comparison​

Vendor	Chip	1.6T-param training	Ecosystem maturity	Availability
Huawei	Ascend 910C	✅ Completed	⭐⭐⭐ (improving)	China-localized
NVIDIA	H100/H200	✅ Industry standard	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐	Global (export-controlled)
AMD	MI300X	✅ Feasible	⭐⭐⭐⭐	Global
Google	TPU v5p/8t	✅ JAX-native	⭐⭐⭐⭐	Google Cloud

Conclusion: Ascend 910C has caught up to H100 in hardware performance, still lags in software ecosystem, but this training success proves engineering feasibility.

Industry impact​

1. The "Zunyi Conference" of domestic compute​

This breakthrough is called the "Zunyi Conference" of domestic compute — from passive defense to strategic counteroffensive.

Specific impact:

• ✅ Breaks the bias that "domestic chips can only do inference"
• ✅ Proves domestic chips can train frontier models
• ✅ Provides compute foundation for domestic large models (e.g., DeepSeek-V4, ERNIE 5.0)

2. Impact on NVIDIA​

Huawei Ascend 910C completing trillion-scale training means China's AI industry is less dependent on NVIDIA.

Scenario	Before	Now
Inference	Domestic chips usable	Domestic chips useful
Training	Must use H100/H200	Can use 910C
Large-scale training	Must use H100 clusters	Can use 910C clusters

3. Boost to the domestic chip industry​

This breakthrough will drive the entire domestic AI chip supply chain:

• Chip design: Cambricon, MetaX, Moore Threads accelerate iteration
• Wafer manufacturing: SMIC, Hua Hong get more orders
• Packaging/test: JCET, TFME benefit

Huawei Ascend roadmap (2025-2028)​

Time	Chip	Positioning
Q1 2025	Ascend 910C	Flagship training/inference (mass-produced)
Q1 2026	Ascend 950PR	Inference-optimized (~500 TFLOPS BF16)
Q4 2026	Ascend 950DT	Data-center training
Q4 2027	Ascend 960	Next-gen flagship
Q4 2028	Ascend 970	Next-next-gen

Training lessons shared​

The Shenzhen Hetao College team accumulated valuable experience:

✅ Successes​

1. Progressive training: start from small models (7B), gradually scale to 1.6T
2. Mixed-precision training: BF16 main + FP32 gradient accumulation
3. Communication optimization: All-to-All overlap with computation
4. Fault recovery: save checkpoint every 1,000 steps

⚠️ Challenges encountered​

1. Memory fragmentation: severe fragmentation over long training, needs periodic cleanup
2. Communication bottleneck: MoE All-to-All takes 30%+ of training time
3. Software bugs: torch_npu occasional memory leak, needs training process restart

Related chips​

• Huawei Ascend 910C - the chip used in this training
• Huawei Ascend 910B - previous-gen chip
• Huawei Ascend 950PR - next-gen inference chip
• NVIDIA H100 - benchmark product
• NVIDIA H200 - benchmark product (HBM3e upgrade)

References​

• Sina Finance: Huawei Ascend 910C completes DS-V4-Pro training
• Tencent News: Milestone! Ascend 910C completes 1.6-trillion-param model training
• 21IC: Huawei chip completes full-parameter post-training of 1.6T AI model

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This article is compiled from public reports. Salute to the teams at Shenzhen Hetao College, HIT (Shenzhen), and Huawei — you proved the feasibility of China's AI compute with engineering results.

June 2026 — Huawei's Ascend 950 series (950PR / 950DT) has entered formal mass production and delivery, a landmark event for China's AI chip industry in 2026. Meanwhile, Cambricon's MLU690 has begun shipping and Moore Threads has announced MTT S5000 specifications, formally establishing China's tri-polar AI chip landscape.

Ascend 950 Series: A Historic Breakthrough with Self-Developed HBM​

Huawei HiSilicon's Ascend 950 series is the fourth-generation Ascend AI chip, first revealed at Huawei Connect 2025 in September and entering mass production in Q1 2026.

950PR (Prefill Inference Specialized)​

Item	Specification
Architecture	Da Vinci v5 (SIMD + SIMT dual-model)
Process	N+2 (SMIC domestic)
HBM	HiBL 1.0 (Huawei self-developed) , 128 GB
FP8 Compute	1 PFLOPS (HiF8 format)
TDP	~400 W
Target	Inference Prefill (video recommendation, real-time interaction)

950DT (Decode + Training Specialized)​

Item	Specification
Architecture	Da Vinci v5 (SIMD + SIMT dual-model)
Process	N+2 (SMIC domestic)
HBM	HiZQ 2.0 (Huawei self-developed) , 144 GB, 4 TB/s
FP8 Compute	1 PFLOPS (HiF8 format)
TDP	~500 W
Target	Inference Decode + Model Training

Historical Significance​

Self-developed HBM (HiBL 1.0 / HiZQ 2.0) represents the most important technical breakthrough of Huawei Ascend 950 — this is the first time a Chinese enterprise has achieved self-developed mass production of HBM memory, completely eliminating dependence on SK Hynix / Samsung HBM supply. Combined with the domestic N+2 process, Ascend 950 has achieved full-chain domestic production from HBM → Compute Die → Packaging → System.

Cambricon MLU690: China's Only Native FP8 Support​

Cambricon's seventh-generation AI chip MLU 690 (Siyuan 690) began volume production and shipping in H1 2026. This is the first domestic AI chip with native FP8 precision support.

Item	MLU 690
Process	5nm (TSMC / SMIC)
FP8 dense	2 PFLOPS
HBM	192GB HBM3E, 5 TB/s
TDP	~500 W
Unit Price (OAM)	~$8,000-12,000

MLU 690's FP8 compute power (2 PFLOPS dense) is on paper comparable to NVIDIA Blackwell (B200 FP8 4.5 PFLOPS sparse). Leveraging its financing advantage as a STAR Market listed company, Cambricon targets 2026 revenue of ¥15-20B (2025: ¥7.2B).

Moore Threads MTT S5000: From Graphics to Training-Inference Unified​

Moore Threads publicly disclosed detailed specifications of the MTT S5000 in February 2026, featuring the fourth-generation MUSA "Pinghu" architecture, single-card AI compute of 1,000 TFLOPS, 80GB GDDR6X memory, 1.6 TB/s bandwidth.

Moore Threads pursues a full-function GPU path (graphics rendering + AI compute + general-purpose compute), closest to NVIDIA's strategy. The founding team comes from former NVIDIA China, and the MUSIFY toolchain helps auto-migrate CUDA code to the MUSA platform, lowering ecosystem migration costs.

China's Tri-Polar AI Chip Landscape​

Dimension	Huawei Ascend	Cambricon	Moore Threads
Core Architecture	Da Vinci v5	MLUv07	MUSA 4th Gen
Process	N+2 domestic	5nm	6nm
FP8 Compute	~1 PFLOPS	2 PFLOPS	0.5 PFLOPS (estimated)
HBM Self-Sufficiency	✅ Self-developed HiBL/HiZQ	❌ Purchased	❌ Purchased
Ecosystem	CANN + MindSpore	NeuWare + MindSpore	MUSA + MUSIFY
Advantage	Full-chain domestic	Highest FP8 compute	Full-function + CUDA migration
2025 Revenue	(Huawei internal)	¥7.2B	¥2.2B

Global Market Comparison (Q2 2026 Update)​

Tier	Vendor	Flagship Chip	FP8/PFLOPS	HBM	Mass Production
Tier 1	NVIDIA	Rubin R200	25 PF (sparse)	288GB HBM4	2026 H2
Tier 2	AMD	MI400	20 PF (dense)	432GB HBM4	2026
	Huawei	Ascend 950DT	1 PF (dense)	144GB self-developed HBM	2026 Q1
	Cambricon	MLU690	2 PF (dense)	192GB HBM3E	2026 H1
	AWS	Trainium 3	5.7 PF (dense)	144GB HBM	2025 Q4 GA
Tier 3	Intel	Gaudi 3	1.8 PF	128GB HBM2e	In production
	Google	TPU v7	4.6 PF(TFLOPS)	192GB HBM	2025
	Moore Threads	MTT S5000	1 PF	80GB GDDR6X	2025 Q1

Note: NVIDIA uses sparse compute as standard, while AMD / Huawei / Cambricon use dense — not directly comparable.

Outlook for H2 2026​

• NVIDIA Rubin R200: Official shipment in H2 2026, 288GB HBM4, 6-chip CoWoS-L packaging
• Huawei Ascend 960: Roadmap H2 2027, expected FP8 compute doubled to 2 PFLOPS
• Cambricon MLU790: Expected 2027, 3nm, 384GB HBM4, 2.5 PFLOPS
• Moore Threads: Next-gen GPU expected with HBM3, 2× MTT S5000 compute

By 2026, China's AI chip industry has formed a complete product matrix from Training (Cambricon MLU690 / Ascend 950DT) → Inference (Ascend 950PR / Moore Threads S5000) → Systems (CloudMatrix / Distributed Clusters).

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This article is based on public information from Huawei Connect 2025 (2025-09-18), industry analysis reports from April 2026, and the latest market data as of June 2026.

Escalating U.S. export controls are forcing China's AI chip industry to accelerate self-reliance. By 2025, the discussion around domestic Chinese AI chips has shifted from "are they usable?" to "which one should I choose?"

This article systematically reviews the major players, core products, and actual deployment status of domestic AI chips, helping developers and procurement decision-makers understand the competitive landscape.