Huawei sets commercial launch dates for Ascend 950 AI cluster cloud service

Huawei Cloud announced it will begin commercial operations of its Ascend 950 AI cluster cloud service in China on September 30. The service will expand to global markets on November 30, according to Huawei Cloud CEO Zhou Yuefeng, speaking at Huawei Connect 2026.

The Ascend 950 system utilizes Huawei’s UnifiedBus interconnect architecture to construct a 1,024-card AI cluster. Huawei states the system can deliver up to 1 EFLOPS of FP8 computing power and 2 EFLOPS of FP4 computing power, supported by 256TB of globally addressable memory. The design aims to enable end-to-end training of large-scale models without requiring additional cluster-level adaptations.

Additionally, Huawei confirmed its Ascend 960 roadmap is ahead of schedule. The Ascend 960DT is slated for the first quarter of 2027, with the 960PR planned for the third quarter. The company reported that over 1,000 Ascend supernodes have been deployed, and Ascend 950 supernodes are already in commercial use.