Key Takeaways
- Huawei unveiled the Atlas 960E SuperPoD, the world’s first AI computing system built around Near-Packaged Optics.
- The system supports up to 4,096 Ascend AI processors and delivers high performance in FP8 and FP4 operations.
- Huawei plans to scale the architecture to support up to 1 million AI processors in the future.
Huawei has introduced the Atlas 960E SuperPoD, a groundbreaking AI computing system designed for training and inference tasks involving large AI models.
The system, unveiled on September 17, 2026, at HUAWEI CONNECT 2026 in Shanghai, is the industry’s first SuperPoD built around Near-Packaged Optics (NPO), a technology that significantly enhances data transmission efficiency.
The Atlas 960E combines Huawei’s UnifiedBus technology, known as Lingqu, with the company’s Hi-ONE optical system, creating a unified memory addressing environment that allows for more efficient and seamless operation of computing resources.
A single Atlas 960E SuperPoD can support up to 4,096 Ascend AI processors, delivering up to 8 EFLOPS of FP8 performance and 16 EFLOPS of FP4 performance, making it a powerful tool for AI model training and inference.
The system features a fully liquid-cooled design and an orthogonal system architecture, enhancing its efficiency and reliability. According to Huawei, the design can reduce power consumption by more than 550kW and achieve 99.8% system availability.
Huawei plans to extend the SuperPoD architecture beyond AI accelerators, with the upgraded TaiShan 950 SuperPoD supporting up to 4,096 nodes and providing a 256TB unified memory pool.
The OceanStor M900 offers petabyte-scale key-value caching for AI workloads, while multiple Atlas 960E SuperPoDs can be connected using UnifiedBus and RoCE networking to scale up to 512,000 AI processors.
The company envisions connecting up to 1 million AI processors through a multi-rail topology, with the Ascend SuperCluster capable of supporting such a large scale.
The Atlas 960E SuperPoD is scheduled to launch in Q3 2027, with several new generations of Ascend AI processors planned for release in the coming years, including the Ascend 960 DT in Q1 2027, the Ascend 960 PR in Q3 2027, and the Ascend 970 in 2028, followed by the Ascend 980 in 2029.
