Huawei has accelerated the timeline for its next-generation Ascend 960DT AI chip, now targeting a first-quarter 2027 release as it intensifies efforts to compete with Nvidia. The company made the announcement on Thursday during its Huawei Connect conference.

"The Ascend 960DT is expected to be ready in Q1 2027. Ascend 960 chips are launching ahead of schedule, doubling performance and advancing year by year," a spokesperson stated. The spokesperson also noted that David Wang, Huawei's rotating and acting chairman, revealed the revised schedule at the event on Thursday.

The timing of this announcement is notable, coming just one week before U.S. President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet on September 24 in Washington, DC.

Huawei's broader ambition involves linking hundreds of thousands — and eventually millions — of AI chips into a single massive computer. The Chinese tech company refers to this strategy as its Peerium Computing Architecture, which depends on UnifiedBus, Huawei's proprietary technology for connecting processors with memory, storage, and networking components.

In a company statement, Eric Xu, Huawei's rotating chairman, explained that the firm is leveraging its new Peerium Computing Architecture to construct larger AI computing systems capable of handling both training and inference workloads. The first systems built on this architecture are Huawei's Atlas 950 SuperPoD and SuperCluster. According to the company, an Atlas 950 SuperCluster can link up to 256,000 accelerator cards.

However, the accelerated chip timeline has raised some questions about Huawei's broader AI system plans. China tech analyst Rui Ma pointed out on X that Huawei had previously indicated its Atlas 960 SuperPoD would scale to 15,488 Ascend 960 chips, yet this week's announcement referenced a system containing 4,096 chips.

"The chip itself is coming WAY earlier, but the SuperPoD they announced is much smaller than what they originally laid out," Ma wrote.

Huawei has persisted in advancing its chip ambitions despite U.S. restrictions limiting China's access to advanced semiconductor technology. Ma expressed doubt that those restrictions would deter China from developing its own semiconductor capabilities.

"I think it's futile to stop China's development in semiconductors because the stakes for self-sufficiency are just too high at this point," she wrote.

Trump has resisted pressure from AI industry leaders who have called for slowing the technology's development due to safety concerns, maintaining instead that the U.S. must preserve its advantage over China. Meanwhile, Xu has contended that China needs to speed up AI development to close the gap with the U.S., noting that Chinese companies must progress further before they can fully grasp and mitigate the risks associated with more powerful AI systems, according to the Financial Times.