Huawei has decided to prioritise its Chinese market for its new Ascend 960 series AI chips due to supply constraints, limiting international release and focusing on local demand as it advances its AI hardware roadmap.
Huawei has decided not to launch its next generation Ascend 900-series AI accelerators internationally, saying domestic demand already exceeds what it can supply. At the Huawei Connect conference, rotating chairman Eric Xu said the company did not have enough capacity to meet orders in China, Reuters reported, adding that only limited volumes would go to a few markets where interest is especially strong.
The move underscores how tightly Huawei’s AI hardware strategy is now bound to China’s own market. The company has set out an updated roadmap for the Ascend 960, 970 and 980 NPUs, promising sizeable gains in training and inference performance over the current Ascend 910C and 950 family. Huawei has also brought forward several releases, with the 960DT and 960PR now expected in 2027, followed by the 970 in 2028 and the 980 in 2029, according to Tom’s Hardware’s account of the presentation.
Even so, the new chips are still projected to trail Nvidia’s latest accelerators on raw compute. Tom’s Hardware said the Ascend 960DT is slated for 2 FP8 PFLOPS and the 960PR for 8 FP4 PFLOPS, while Nvidia’s H200 and B300 already sit higher on training throughput. Huawei’s later parts should improve on memory and interconnect capacity, but the gap means the company is leaning more heavily on cluster-scale systems than on single-chip performance.
That is visible in Huawei’s Atlas SuperPoD and SuperCluster plans. Tom’s Hardware reported that a configuration using as many as 15,488 Ascend 960 chips could reach 30 FP8 exaflops and 120 FP4 exaflops, but at the cost of much heavier power use than comparable Nvidia systems. The same report said Huawei is trying to ease internal pressure through near-package optics and other design changes that free up older-node capacity, yet supply remains constrained because SMIC still cannot ramp 7nm and 6nm-class production quickly enough.
For now, Huawei appears to view China as the only market large enough to absorb what it can actually build. Tom’s Hardware cited estimates that AI chip revenue could reach about $12 billion this year, with domestic orders from major Chinese technology groups helping fill the pipeline. Outside China, the company may instead push cloud access to its hardware and software stack, a more realistic way to broaden adoption while manufacturing remains the limiting factor.
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