Rotating Chairman Wang Tao debuted the Ascend 960 at the company's Connect event on September 17 to integrate near package optics into AI hardware. The system scales to 4,096 cards and hits 8 EFLOPS FP8, utilizing 5,500 Hi-ONE NPO engines to eliminate 48,000 800G optical modules. This design lowers power consumption by over 550 kW and ships in Q3 2027.

Huawei claims the product is entering volume production with 99.8% availability and twice the fault free runtime of previous systems. Third party verification of these claims does not exist, and no units have shipped. The shift toward NPO targets AI scale by moving optical integration inside the node, a strategy that differs from the chip centric approach used by Nvidia.