Huawei Unveils Ascend 960 Super Node with NPO Tech, Launching Q3 2027

At Huawei Connect 2026 in Shanghai on September 17, Huawei Deputy Chairman Wang Tao unveiled the Ascend 960 Super Node, the world's first super node using NPO technology. The product is set to launch in Q3 2027.

Built on Lingqu and the Hi-ONE optical engine, the Ascend 960 uses an orthogonal architecture and full liquid cooling. It scales to 4,096 cards, delivering 8 EFLOPS FP8 and 16 EFLOPS FP4. Huawei also launched Hi-ONE, the industry's first mass-produced NPO optical engine with 7.2T capacity and built-in light source.

The super node replaces 48,000 800G optical modules with 5,500 Hi-ONE units, cutting power by over 550 kW and boosting system availability to 99.8%. Huawei also upgraded its Kunpeng super node for general computing, supporting up to 4,096 nodes and a 256TB unified memory pool.

Multiple Ascend 960 super nodes can connect via Lingqu or RoCE to form clusters of up to 512,000 cards, and with multi-rail topology, up to 1 million cards.