New Delhi: The Chinese tech firm, Huawei Technologies, plans two new AI chips to be available in 2027, joining the Chinese competition for the second year in the AI computing market which has been dominated by Nvidia so far.
On Thursday, chairman David Wang revealed that Huawei will release a chip dubbed the “960DT” in the first quarter of 2027, followed by the Ascend 960PR in the third quarter. Both are part of Huawei’s Ascend series and the company has been hoping that it can make a viable contribution to AI computing in China and beyond.
Wang also detailed a technology that can be called as UnifiedBus. This system connects numerous chips to operate as a single large computer. This “linking” function will play a key role in Huawei’s next generation of artificial intelligence systems, he said. Huawei already has 11 chip models based on this technology.
Huawei’s biggest connected systems are known as superclusters, which can connect up to one million AI chips simultaneously, Wang said. Miniaturized forms, known as supernodes, have already been sent to customers, a total of over 1,000 supernodes were sent to over 370 buyers. He didn’t reveal the names of the guests or provide exact figures of the amount of chips used per system.
The announcement follows a fierce race for U.S.-China AI hardware. Washington has tightened its supply of high-tech American chips and chip-making machinery to China amid a U.S. drive to ensure companies such as Huawei have no need for such components from firms such as Nvidia to produce its devices.
Chinese firms can’t always afford the latest foreign chips, and so much as linking many smaller chips together has grown into a crucial method for acquiring more computing power.
Huawei’s AI chip ecosystem now has 5,270 active developers developing software monthly, indicating the company is attempting to establish a software development ecosystem around its chipsets, like Nvidia has done with its graphics chips over the years, Wang added.
Huawei still has a long way to go until it can reach the scale and software dominance of Nvidia across the globe. However, two new chips are planned, plus a clutch of new developers, and the company is obviously taking steps to address that divide.
