Huawei is making a bold play in the AI hardware market, laying out an ambitious roadmap to challenge NVIDIA‘s dominance within the next three years. The company recently unveiled a multi-year plan for its Ascend line of AI chips. The company hopes to close the technology gap and become a major player in the global race for AI acceleration.
A three-year plan: Huawei’s AI chips are coming for NVIDIA
The core of Huawei’s strategy isn’t just about building faster chips. The firm also aims to build a better network between them. Huawei introduced a new interconnect protocol called UnifiedBus, which it claims can link up to 15,500 chips into a single system. This protocol is reportedly 62 times faster than NVIDIA’s upcoming NVLink144 standard. This could give Huawei a serious advantage in creating massive AI supercomputers, where the speed of data transfer between chips is just as important as the power of the chips themselves.
As reported by Bloomberg, this approach is particularly clever given the challenges Huawei faces. Due to international restrictions, the company has run into trouble producing its existing chips at the most advanced manufacturing nodes. Without access to cutting-edge fabrication tools from companies like TSMC, catching up to NVIDIA on single-chip performance is difficult. By focusing on superior networking and designing vast clusters, Huawei hopes to compete through scale and efficiency rather than just raw chip power.
Ascend 950 and Ascend 960 AI chips
Huawei’s plan includes a clear schedule for new hardware. The tech giant will first launch two versions of the Ascend 950 in 2026. Later, in 2027, the Ascend 960 will arrive with double the performance. The final chip on the roadmap, the Ascend 970, is slated for 2028 and will feature a blazing-fast 4 Tbit/s interface.
This aggressive push is also part of a larger effort in China to reduce its reliance on foreign technology. Huawei has strong government backing and a deep history in networking. So, it’s well-positioned to lead this charge. The company is clearly betting big on AI acceleration as a key part of its future.
