Rotating chairman Wang Tao unveiled the Ascend 960 SuperPoD at the Huawei Connect 2026 conference in Shanghai on Thursday. A single SuperPoD connects 4,096 cards and delivers 8 EFLOPS of FP8 compute with 1 PB of HBM to run models of up to 10 trillion parameters. The system utilizes 5,500 Hi-ONE optical engines to replace 48,000 800G optical modules, which cuts power consumption by more than 550 kW and lifts system availability to 99.8%.

The Ascend 960DT AI chip launches in the first quarter of 2027, followed by the 960PR in the third quarter. This transition to near-packaged optics allows light to replace electrical signals next to the chip package to bypass constraints on semiconductor manufacturing processes. Huawei has already deployed more than 1,000 Ascend 910C SuperPoDs and schedules the air-cooled Atlas 860 for shipment in the second quarter of 2027.