China’s AI chip shortage keeps Huawei’s next accelerators at home
Huawei says its next Ascend 900-series AI accelerators will mainly stay in China because it cannot yet meet domestic demand, limiting access for overseas buyers. The roadmap includes Ascend 960 variants targeting 2 PFLOPS of FP8 training and up to 8 PFLOPS of FP4 inference in 2027, with later 970 and 980 chips projected higher. Huawei also says Atlas SuperPoDs can combine up to 15,488 Ascend 960 NPUs, though the article notes they trail Nvidia in raw compute today.