Huawei unveils Ascend 960 SuperPoD with NPO technology to power next-generation AI infrastructure
Huawei unveiled its Ascend 960 SuperPoD at HUAWEI CONNECT 2026. This new AI infrastructure supports up to 4,096 NPU cards. It delivers up to 8E FP8 computing power and 1PB of HBM capacity. The SuperPoD is the first to use Near-Packaged Optics (NPO) technology, which aims to reduce power consumption by over 550kW.
Huawei's Ascend 960 SuperPoD is more than a new chip. It represents a system-level rethink of AI infrastructure. The company claims its NPO technology, Hi-ONE, replaces 48,000 optical modules with 5,500 units. This approach tackles interconnect bottlenecks that consume over 40% of training time in traditional 100,000-card AI clusters.
This shift from chip competition to system competition matters for Asia. Chinese AI developers face US export controls on advanced GPUs. Huawei's integrated SuperPoD offers a domestic alternative. It aims to deliver scale and efficiency for large models, reducing reliance on Nvidia's ecosystem. This strengthens China's AI self-sufficiency push.
The test for Huawei is real-world adoption and performance. Its claims of doubling mean time between failures and achieving 99.8% availability are ambitious. Competitors will watch whether the Ascend 960 SuperPoD can reliably power 10-trillion-parameter models in production. Enterprise uptake will define its success.
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