US-sanctioned Huawei’s disclosure “is educating the market about what’s ahead”, while signalling that the Shenzhen-based company “can match Nvidia’s multi-year road map”, said Kevin Xu, founder of US-based investment firm Interconnected Capital.
Huawei deputy chairman Eric Xu Zhijun, who serves as the privately held company’s rotating chairman from April to September, unveiled the plans to launch upgraded Ascend AI chips over the next three years at Thursday’s opening in Shanghai of the Huawei Connect 2025 conference, which concludes on Saturday.
The Ascend 950PR, designed for prefill and recommendation, will be available in the first quarter of 2026, while the Ascend 950DT, tailored for decoding and training, will launch in the fourth quarter of next year. Prefill is a fundamental step in AI model inference that ensures all input tokens are efficiently processed.
The Ascend 960 and 970 processors are expected to be released in the fourth quarter of 2027 and 2028, respectively.
The unveiling of Huawei’s AI chip road map reflected the company’s increased confidence in designing products that are competitive with those from US suppliers Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, following years of holding its semiconductor development plans close to its chest since it was added to Washington’s trade blacklist in 2019.
