Subj : Huawei throws massive 1-million NPU gauntlet at Nvidia and AMD as To : All From : TechnologyDaily Date : Thu Sep 18 2025 11:00:10 Huawei throws massive 1-million NPU gauntlet at Nvidia and AMD as it positions itself an alternative to US AI giants Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2025 09:49:05 +0000 Description: Who needs Instinct or Blackwell when weve got the Ascend family from Huawei. FULL STORY ====================================================================== Huawei has announced what it calls the, worlds most powerful SuperPoDs and superclusters. In AI nomenclature, a SuperPOD is a group of racks that work as a single unit integrating compute, network, software, storage and management. A supercluster is a group of superPODs. Given that Nvidia trademarked SuperPOD , the Chinese company was smart enough to call its product SuperPoD (AMD has its own version called MegaPOD ). Its Atlas 950 SuperPoD comprises of 8,192 Ascend NPU (essentially AI accelerators) with a superior version, the 960, delivering almost twice that number at 15,488 (89% more). A supercluster with 1-million NPUs The Atlas 950 will use the newly announced Ascend 950 chips while the Ascend 960 series will fit in the Atlas 960. The 950 series will be available in Q1 26, while the 960 will come in Q4 27 and - youve guessed it - theres an Ascend 970 planned for Q4 2028. Huaweis deputy chairman, Eric Xu, went on to claim that its SuperPoDs are currently the most powerful SuperPoDs in the world, and will remain so for years to come, based on publicly available roadmaps from Nvidia and AMD (although he didnt name them). Xu went on to announce superclusters based on the Atlas 950 and Atlas 960, with more than 520,000 (64 superPoDs) and more than one million NPUs, respectively (at least 66 superPoDs). This, Xu posits, will outstrip xAI Colossus , currently the worlds largest computing cluster. The caveat is that xAI is already working on Colossus 2 , one of a number of Gigawatt-class clusters that will almost certainly surpass 950-based and 960-based superclusters. Oracle/OpenAI, Meta and AWS/Anthropic are also building such (hyper)clusters as well. A third surprise announcement was the launch of UnifiedBus, which is Huaweis alternative to Nvidias Infiniband . The company is keen to create an open UnifiedBus ecosystem, but its press release doesnt mention whether this interconnect protocol will be open-sourced. Huaweis claims - if true - are impressive: 100x improved reliability for optical interconnect, with maximum range extended to more than 200 meters (almost 700 feet) and NPU-NPU latency reduced to 2.1ms, a 30% improvement over current technologies. Chinese companies and Chinas central government are most certainly going to be the main customers of Huaweis SuperPoDs and superclusters for now. Pricing, performance and power consumption are yet to be detailed. You might also like Ever wondered which AI tools the CEO of Nvidia uses? We have the answer - straight from Jensen Huang himself Ryzen AI Max+ 395 CPU could be AMD's sleeper hit against Nvidia's AI dominance Here are the best mobile workstations around today ====================================================================== Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/huawei-throws-massive-1-million-npu-gauntlet-at- nvidia-and-amd-as-it-positions-itself-an-alternative-to-us-ai-giants --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 (Linux/64) * Origin: tqwNet Technology News (1337:1/100) .