Huawei unveils Atlas 960 SuperPoD to challenge Nvidia in AI chips

Huawei has never been shy about playing the long game. At HUAWEI CONNECT 2026 in Shanghai on September 17, the company pulled back the curtain on the Atlas 960E SuperPoD, a computing cluster designed to go toe-to-toe with Nvidia in the AI infrastructure market. What the Atlas 960E actually does The Atlas 960E fits up to 4,096 of Huawei’s Ascend Neural Processing Units into a single unified memory-addressing scheme, meaning every chip sees the same pool of memory rather than passing data back and forth across slow interconnects. Performance figures Huawei is claiming are striking. The system delivers 8 EFLOPS for FP8 computations and 16 EFLOPS for FP4, with up to 1 petabyte of High Bandwidth Memory across the full configuration. Compared to the previous Atlas 950 SuperPoD, Huawei says the 960E delivers between 2.3 and 4 times better performance on training and inference tasks for models approaching 10 trillion parameters. The Atlas 960E replaces roughly 48,000 conventional 800G optical modules with approximately 5,500 Hi-ONE Near-Packaged Optics units. The new approach cuts power consumption by more than 550 kilowatts per pod. System availability reaches 99.8%, and mean time between...