At Huawei Connect 2026 in Shanghai on September 17, Huawei Deputy Chairman and Rotating Chairman Eric Xu (Wang Tao) unveiled the Ascend 960 supernode — the world's first supernode to adopt NPO (near-package optics) technology — to accelerate training and inference for models at the ten-trillion-parameter scale.
Built on the "Lingqu + Hi-ONE" architecture, the Ascend 960 uses an orthogonal design and full liquid cooling, with unified memory addressing via Lingqu, scaling to 4,096 cards and delivering 8 EFLOPS (FP8) and 16 EFLOPS (FP4).
Hi-ONE is the industry's first mass-produced NPO product, the largest-capacity NPO to date at 7.2 T total, and the only one with an integrated light source. Replacing about 48,000 800G optical modules with 5,500 Hi-ONE units cuts power consumption by over 550 kW and doubles fault-free runtime, lifting system availability to 99.8%.
Multiple Ascend 960 supernodes can link via Lingqu or RoCE into clusters of up to 512,000 cards, supporting a maximum one-million-card Ascend cluster. Huawei said Ascend 960 chips are ready ahead of schedule with doubled performance: the 960DT arrives in Q1 2027 and the 960PR in Q3 2027, with the 970 and 980 planned for 2028 and 2029.
