Huawei
Huawei is a Chinese maker of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices, founded in 1987,1 with its headquarters at Huawei Base in Bantian, Longgang District, Shenzhen.2 It says it has about 213,000 employees and operates in more than 170 countries and regions.1 Its AI accelerators are the Ascend chips. In his keynote at Huawei Connect 2025 in Shanghai on September 18, 2025, Huawei’s Eric Xu said the company launched the Ascend 310 in 2018 and the Ascend 910 in 2019, and that the Ascend 910C had become better known in 2025 as Huawei scaled up its Atlas 900 A3 SuperPoD, a system of up to 384 Ascend 910C chips.3
The same keynote set out Huawei’s chip roadmap, which MetaPrompt reports as plans: the Ascend 950PR in the first quarter of 2026, the Ascend 950DT in the fourth quarter of 2026, the Ascend 960 in the fourth quarter of 2027 and the Ascend 970 in the fourth quarter of 2028, on a one-year release cycle.3 Huawei will pair the 950 chips with two HBMs of its own design: HiBL 1.0, a lower-cost HBM for the 950PR, and HiZQ 2.0, which gives the 950DT 144 GB of memory at 4 TB/s. Xu put the Ascend 950 series at 1 PFLOPS in FP8 and 2 PFLOPS in FP4, without saying whether those figures are dense or sparse.3 In AI Accelerators With the Most HBM per Chip (October 2026), the Ascend 950DT is listed apart as announced, not shipping, and the Ascend 910C is left out because no Huawei page MetaPrompt opened states its memory.
Huawei’s chips also figure in US policy. On May 13, 2025, the Bureau of Industry and Security said it was issuing guidance alerting industry to the risks of using Chinese advanced computing chips, “including specific Huawei Ascend chips,” in the same release that announced it would not enforce the AI diffusion rule; How US AI Chip Export Controls Work covers both.4
Key facts
| Founded | 19871 |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Huawei Base, Shenzhen, China2 |
| AI chip line | Ascend (Ascend 310 in 2018; Ascend 910 in 2019)3 |
| Largest Ascend system in service | Atlas 900 A3 SuperPoD, up to 384 Ascend 910C chips Vendor-stated3 |
| Ascend 950DT memory (planned) | 144 GB HiZQ 2.0 HBM, 4 TB/s Vendor-stated3 |
| Ascend 950 series compute (planned) | 1 PFLOPS FP8; 2 PFLOPS FP4; sparsity not stated Vendor-stated3 |
| Roadmap, as stated Sept 2025 | 950PR Q1 2026; 950DT Q4 2026; 960 Q4 2027; 970 Q4 20283 |
As of . Ascend 950 and later figures are Huawei’s plans from its September 2025 keynote, not datasheet values. How figures are labeled.
Appears in
Sources
- Huawei, Corporate Information, retrieved 2026-10-13.
- Huawei, Contact Us (Huawei HQ address), retrieved 2026-10-13.
- Huawei, Keynote Speech by Eric Xu at Huawei Connect 2025 (Shanghai, September 18, 2025), retrieved 2026-10-13.
- Bureau of Industry and Security, “Department of Commerce Announces Rescission of Biden-Era Artificial Intelligence Diffusion Rule, Strengthens Chip-Related Export Controls”, press release, May 13, 2025, retrieved 2026-10-13.