Huawei's next-generation Ascend 950 AI accelerator has been pictured for the first time, showcasing the company's custom silicon and HBM memory. The chip combines Huawei's first self-developed HBM memory with a new generation of AI acceleration. Huawei aims to compete through scale rather than focusing solely on single-chip performance. Although it currently trails NVIDIA in per-chip performance, Huawei's system-scale solutions can still be competitive. The company has announced the Ascend 950 family for early 2026, featuring two variants.

The 950PR model includes 128 GB of in-house HBM with around 1.6 TB/s of bandwidth, while the 950DT model increases memory to 144 GB and boosts bandwidth to nearly 4 TB/s. Both chips target one PetaFLOP of FP8, and two PetaFLOPS of FP4. Huawei's competitive strategy emphasizes dense packaging and aggressive networking, rather than relying solely on raw per-chip performance. We have no information on the node selection, but it will likely be SMIC's newest N+3 node with 5 nm-class features. Chinese SMIC has officially achieved volume production of its newest 5 nm node relying on the deep ultraviolet (DUV) to manufacture its silicon. Since the first customer for N+3 was Huawei with Kirin 9030 SoC, it is only logical that the more important Ascend AI accelerator family is manufactured using the same node.