Huawei has presented Not one, but two products with which he wants to challenge Nvidia’s domain in the segment of the great clusters of Ia chips. Its new “superpod” atlas 950 and Atlas 960. These are high performance clusters with a crucial characteristic: thousands of chips specialized in AI have gathered to be used in future data centers.
Why is it important. This movement reinforces the position in the global IA panorama by Huawei. These “superpod” group thousands of their own AI chips, and suppose a notable weapon to compete with the current Nvidia domain especially in a China increasingly overturned in Avoid totally The dependence of foreign partners. Not in vain his administration of cyberspace has banned companies in the country to buy or try Nvidia chips.
If you want to win Nvidia, scale. Huawei’s chips cannot compete from you to you with the modern Nvidia chips, so Huawei has found an alternative solution: focusing on climbing their solutions by combining thousands of chips with a connectivity technology that competes directly with the NVLink of Nvidia. The number of chips that meet these clusters is as follows:
- ATLAS 950 OVERPOD: 8,192 processors
- ATLAS 960 OVERPOD: 15,488 processors
Of supercluster superpod. Starting from that base, Huawei also announced the new 950 Supercluster and Atlas 960 Supercluster. These systems are designed to go one step further, and the goal is to support between 500,000 and one million ED processors. According to Huawei, this would make them the “most powerful computer clusters in the world.”
By and for China. Xu Zhijun, acting president of Huawei, confirmed the strategy of the company in the Huawei Connect event held in Shanghai. According to his words “Huawei seeks to create a” Supernode + Cluster “computer solution using chips manufacturing processes available in China to meet the growing computer needs.”
China pushing. This technological impulse is produced in the middle of a tense Commercial and Technological Battle Between the United States and China. The restrictions imposed by the North American country They have ended up producing a clear reaction in the Asian giant, which wants to avoid the dependence of foreign partners. For years Nvidia has been the standard for the AI industry, but China is looking to boost national alternatives … and is taking notable steps to achieve it.
New Ascend on Way. Huawei is also preparing New artificial intelligence chips. The Ascend 950PR will be theoretically launched at the beginning of next year, while the Ascend 950DT will do so at the end of 2026. In that road map has also talked about the Ascend 960, which will arrive in 960, and the Ascend 970, which will do it a year later, in 2028.
Source: Semiianalysis.
The idea seems to work. We saw a few weeks ago how that great cluster approach to Huawei It seems to make sense. Its cloudmatrix 384 nodes combines 384 GPUS Ascend 910C, and surpasses NVL72 NVIDIA based on the most powerful GB200. It does not do it at the chip level, but at the system level: the power is almost double and the HBM memory capacity is 3.6x. One thing is safe: Nvidia is not going to be still, and other rivals like AMD are not going to do, but here Huawei has a promising strategy.
Image | Paul Hanaoka
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