Huawei unveils Ascend 960 supernode, shipping only next year
Huawei announced a 4096-card supernode and UnifiedBus interconnect, but all figures are vendor claims and the air-cooled version ships in Q2 2027 — no deployable capacity exists today.
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At HUAWEI CONNECT on September 17, Huawei announced the Ascend 960 supernode: 4096 cards per node, with a claimed maximum of 8 EFLOPS FP8 compute and 1PB of HBM capacity.
The accompanying UnifiedBus (灵衢) interconnect protocol spans chip to cluster. Huawei says it lifts MFU on 100,000-card clusters from 20% to 35% and supports up to 1 million AI processors per cluster.
Mind the stage: every figure is from Huawei's own keynote with no independent testing. The air-cooled supernode ships in Q2 2027 and the liquid-cooled version in Q3 — no purchasable capacity exists today.