Huawei has moved up the launch of its next-generation Ascend 960DT AI chip to the first quarter of 2027, the company announced Thursday at its Huawei Connect conference. A Huawei spokesperson told TechCrunch that the chip was previously expected in Q3 2027, and that David Wang, Huawei’s rotating and acting chairman, revealed the accelerated timeline at the event. The spokesperson said the Ascend 960DT is expected to be ready in Q1 2027, with Ascend 960 chips launching ahead of schedule and doubling performance year by year.

The announcement lands about a week before U.S. President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to meet on September 24 in Washington, DC. Huawei is positioning its AI hardware strategy around turning hundreds of thousands — and eventually millions — of AI chips into a single large computing system, an approach it calls the Peerium Computing Architecture. The architecture relies on UnifiedBus, Huawei’s technology for linking processors with memory, storage, and networking hardware. Eric Xu, Huawei’s rotating chairman, said in the company’s statement that Peerium is being used to build larger AI computing systems designed for both training and inference.

Huawei’s Atlas 950 SuperPoD and SuperCluster are the first systems based on the new architecture. The company says an Atlas 950 SuperCluster can connect up to 256,000 accelerator cards. However, the accelerated chip timeline has drawn questions about the scale of Huawei’s broader AI systems. China tech analyst Rui Ma noted on X that Huawei had previously said its Atlas 960 SuperPoD would scale to 15,488 Ascend 960 chips, while this week’s announcement referred to a system with 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 continued advancing its chip ambitions despite U.S. restrictions on China’s access to advanced semiconductor technology. Ma argued those restrictions are unlikely to stop China’s pursuit of self-sufficiency: “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.” Trump has pushed back against calls from AI industry leaders to slow AI development over safety concerns, saying the U.S. needs to maintain its lead over China. Meanwhile, Xu argued that China needs to accelerate AI development to catch up with the U.S., saying Chinese companies need to advance further before they can fully understand and address the risks posed by more powerful AI systems, according to the Financial Times.