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Iris Deng

Howard Liu

Huawei Technologies expects a major domestic shift towards its artificial intelligence computing infrastructure for model training next year, as its Ascend processors gain ground on Nvidia in China despite supply constraints, according to rotating chairman Eric Xu Zhijun.
“I believe that starting from next year, a lot of the AI model training will be based on the SuperPoD or SuperCluster based on Ascend 950DT,” Xu told reporters during the Huawei Connect 2026 conference in Shanghai on Thursday.
Xu said Huawei’s proprietary Ascend chips had overtaken Nvidia in domestic market share, although he did not provide specific figures.
Nvidia confirmed last month that it had begun shipments of its H200 processors to China under a new US licensing arrangement after a months-long lockout, although those sales represented less than 1 per cent of its second-quarter data-centre revenue.
Huawei has been pushing its own alternative computing infrastructure amid US export controls that were designed to restrict China’s access to advanced semiconductors, such as those from Nvidia.
China’s most advanced AI models were still being trained on Nvidia chips, the SCMP reported last month, citing sources at major Chinese AI developers.
“Even though there might be some gaps between Ascend and some of its competitors, it offers the strongest support for mainland Chinese customers,” Xu said, adding that many clients chose Ascend due to geopolitical risks and a preference for multi-vendor strategies.
“Pushing full chip self-sufficiency is the certain path forward for China,” Xu said. “I believe it will become a reality sooner or later.”

However, international availability for Huawei’s latest hardware remains constrained.
While the Shenzhen-based tech giant unveiled its new Atlas 960 SuperPoD computing cluster on Thursday – powered by Ascend 960 chips and boasting double the training and inference performance of its predecessor – production limits would keep the systems mostly within China, Xu said.
“Since we don’t have enough capacity to even satisfy the demand in China, we don’t have the plan to expand [SuperPoD systems] to the international market in a fully fledged way,” Xu said, though he noted the firm has been shipping small quantities overseas for testing in high-demand regions.
Huawei’s previous-generation Atlas 950 SuperPoD, powered by the Ascend 950DT chip, had increasingly been deployed for AI model training with encouraging initial testing results, according to Xu. Huawei had deployed over 1,000 Atlas SuperPoD units across more than 370 enterprise customers, the company said.
On Thursday, Huawei also introduced its Peerium Computing Architecture, a technology designed to interconnect 1 million processors to function as a single computer. Already deployed on Atlas 950 systems, Peerium was undergoing testing on the new Atlas 960 hardware, the company said.
Despite its technological leaps, Xu cautioned that computing supply still lagged behind China’s surging AI demand. He projected that global AI computing supply and demand would reach equilibrium around 2029, with China reaching a balance slightly later in 2030.


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The firm’s Ascend chips are ahead of Nvidia in domestic market, Huawei’s Eric Xu Zhijun says


The firm’s Ascend chips are ahead of Nvidia in domestic market, Huawei’s Eric Xu Zhijun says.


China to see major shift to Huawei for AI model training in 2027: deputy chair

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The firm’s Ascend chips are ahead of Nvidia in domestic market, Huawei’s Eric Xu Zhijun says

The firm’s Ascend chips are ahead of Nvidia in domestic market, Huawei’s Eric Xu Zhijun says