Huawei Technologies Co. detailed its most ambitious push yet into advanced chipmaking and computing infrastructure, promising to double the power of its AI processors annually and launch what it claims will be the world's most powerful supercomputing systems by 2027. The announcement signals Beijing's determination to reduce dependence on U.S. suppliers such as Nvidia Corp. as Washington and Beijing escalate their tech rivalry.
At the Huawei Connect conference Thursday, rotating chairman Eric Xu said the company will follow "a one-year release cycle and double compute with each release." Huawei outlined a roadmap for its Ascend series of AI chips through 2028 and announced plans for Kunpeng server chip upgrades in 2026 and 2028. Xu also said Huawei had developed proprietary high-bandwidth memory, a technology previously dominated by South Korea's SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics.
Central to Huawei's strategy is a new class of high-performance "supernodes" designed to interconnect thousands of Ascend chips at extremely high speeds. The Atlas 950 supernode, expected in late 2026, will support 8,192 Ascend chips and "will far exceed its counterparts across all major metrics," Xu said. Its successor, the Atlas 960, will launch in 2027 with capacity for 15,488 chips per node. Huawei also plans to assemble more than 500,000 chips into an Atlas 950 SuperCluster and more than 1 million into the Atlas 960 version.
Xu directly compared Huawei's forthcoming systems with Nvidia's, claiming the Atlas 950 would deliver "6.7 times more computing power than Nvidia's NVL144 system" and that the 2027 Atlas 960 would outperform Nvidia's next-generation offerings and even Elon Musk's xAI Colossus supercomputer. "Huawei's product will be ahead on all fronts," Xu told attendees.
Huawei's announcement came just days after Chinese regulators reportedly ordered major tech firms including ByteDance and Alibaba to stop buying Nvidia's AI chips and cancel pending orders, part of an expanding antitrust investigation into the U.S. company. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he was "disappointed" by the reported ban but added that the company must "be in service of a market if the country wants us to be."
The timing of Huawei's unveiling appears designed to send a message before a Friday meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. "China is trying to say that they're doing very well on many fronts ... Xi Jinping will be more confident when speaking with Donald Trump," said Alfred Wu, associate professor at the National University of Singapore.
Shares of Chinese semiconductor firms rose 3.4% after the Financial Times report on the Nvidia order halt. Analysts say Huawei's bold roadmap underscores how far Chinese firms have come since U.S. sanctions in 2019 cut off access to advanced chip technology. "For Huawei to come out at this point and openly show strength with its AI chips ... there's growing confidence U.S. export controls are not really threatening this process anymore," said Tilly Zhang of Gavekal Dragonomics.
Huawei said it has already deployed more than 300 of its Atlas 900 A3 supernodes to 20 customers in industries such as telecom and manufacturing. The company's strategy, said Omdia's Wang Shen, "leverages its strengths in networking, along with China's advantages in power supply, to aggressively push supernodes and offset lagging chip manufacturing."
