Huawei announces world’s ‘most powerful’ AI chip cluster as competition with US heats up

Chinese telecommunications company Huawei has announced a slew of new computing systems and artificial intelligence (AI) computing chips that it claims could be more powerful than Nvidia’s.

The company said there would be two new “logical machines” that are able to learn, think, and reason: the Atlas 950 SuperPoD and the Atlas 960 SuperPoD. 

Huawei said on Thursday that the SuperPoDs will be the “most powerful” in the world on several fronts, including computing power, memory, bandwidth, and the number of neural processing units (NPUs) that will accelerate AI and machine learning. 

"Computing power is – and will continue to be – key to AI. This is especially true in China,” said Eric Xu, Huawei’s deputy chairman.

The company also announced it will be launching a new series of AI computing chips called Ascend starting in 2026. Both the SuperPoDs and the chips are part of a new “computing architecture” that Xu said will “sustainably meet long-term demand for computing power”.

AI chip competition between the US and China heats up

The announcement comes as Huawei and other companies try to compete with US chip giant Nvidia.

China is pressuring its tech companies to break their reliance on foreign chip makers so it can compete in the AI race.

Xu claimed that the Atlas950 SuperPoD will have “56.8 times” more NPUs, 6.7 times more computing power and 15 times more memory capacity than Nvidia’s upcoming NVL144 system. It wasn’t immediately clear how the two systems compare. 

Nvidia has faced increased restrictions on its chip exports to China under both former US president Joe Biden and current President Donald Trump.

The United States banned Nvidia from selling its most powerful chips, the Blackwell chip, to China in April, arguing it was necessary to safeguard US national and economic security as the AI global race gains pace.

The US appeared to reverse course after Nvidia agreed to pay the government 15 per cent of what it earns from chip sales to China. While selling the Blackwell chip to China is still up in the air, Nvidia did get the clearance to export its watered-down H20 chip to China.

Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said earlier this month that his company is discussing a potential new computer chip designed for China with the Trump administration.

However, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday that China’s internet regulator had banned local companies from buying Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000 chips, as Beijing tries to reduce dependence on foreign semiconductors. 

The Chinese government accused Nvidia earlier this week of violating the country’s anti-monopoly laws when it bought Israeli technology company Mellanox Technologies in 2019 for $6.9 billion (€5.83 billion).