At the Huawei Connect 2025 conference in Shanghai, Vice Chairman Eric Xu unveiled the "world's most powerful" SuperPoD and SuperCluster systems and announced plans to release new AI chips in the coming years.
First, Xu introduced the new SuperPoDs — combined systems of multiple physical machines that work as a single powerful computer. These are the Atlas 950 SuperPoD with 8,192 Ascend AI accelerators and the Atlas 960 SuperPoD with 15,488 chips. According to Huawei, these are the most powerful SuperPoDs in the world, and they will remain so for a long time to come.
Huawei says the Atlas 950 SuperPoD will have 56.8 times more neural processors than the upcoming NVIDIA NVL144 system (expected in 2026). This will give it 6.7 times more computing power. In addition, the Chinese SuperPoD will have 15 times more memory — 1,152 TB — and its throughput will reach 16 PB/s, which is 62 times higher than its American counterpart.
Huawei even compares its new system to the NVIDIA NVL576, which is expected to launch in 2027, and claims that the Atlas 950 SuperPoD will still be better than it in all respects.
Xu also unveiled the Atlas 950 SuperCluster, with over 500,000 Ascend processors, and the Atlas 960 SuperCluster, with over a million of these chips. These are massive computing clusters assembled from multiple Huawei SuperPoDs that the company says will outperform all other solutions on the market.
Another announcement was new processors for artificial intelligence. Huawei says the Ascend 950 will have a data transfer rate between chips of 2 TB/s, 2.5 times faster than the Ascend 910C. In the fourth quarter of 2027, the company plans to release the Ascend 960 with twice the computing power, and in late 2028, the Ascend 970.
Huawei's announcements are clearly aimed at competing with NVIDIA. The company is currently the main alternative to the American manufacturer, which recently faced new restrictions on the sale of its chips - this time from the Chinese authorities. As previously reported, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) ordered companies such as ByteDance and Alibaba to stop testing and purchasing the RTX 6000D.