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Huawei has unveiled the Atlas 960E SuperPoD, a new AI computing system designed to handle increasingly large artificial intelligence models. The company announced the system on September 17 at HUAWEI CONNECT 2026 in Shanghai.
Huawei says the Atlas 960E is the industry’s first SuperPoD based on Near-Packaged Optics (NPO). The system supports training and inference for AI models approaching 10 trillion parameters.
Built for Large-Scale AI
The Atlas 960E combines Huawei’s UnifiedBus technology, also known as Lingqu, with the company’s Hi-ONE optical system. The architecture uses unified memory addressing, allowing computing resources to work more like a single system rather than separate machines.
A single SuperPoD can support up to 4,096 Ascend AI processors and deliver up to 8 EFLOPS of FP8 performance and 16 EFLOPS of FP4 performance. Huawei says the system uses a fully liquid-cooled design and an orthogonal architecture.
Hi-ONE Cuts Optical Hardware
A key part of the system is Huawei’s Hi-ONE NPO optical engine. Huawei says it offers 7.2 terabits per second of transmission capacity and includes an integrated light source.
The Atlas 960E uses about 5,500 Hi-ONE units, replacing roughly 48,000 traditional 800G optical modules. Huawei claims the design can reduce power consumption by more than 550 kilowatts, double fault-free operating time and provide 99.8% system availability.
Scaling to 1 Million AI Processors
Huawei is also extending the SuperPoD approach to general-purpose computing. Its upgraded TaiShan 950 SuperPoD supports up to 4,096 nodes and a 256 TB unified memory pool, while the OceanStor M900 provides petabyte-scale key-value caching for AI workloads.
Huawei also plans to connect multiple Atlas 960E SuperPoDs into larger AI clusters using UnifiedBus and RoCE networking. The company says its architecture can connect up to 512,000 AI processors, while a multi-rail topology can scale an Ascend SuperCluster to 1 million processors.
The Atlas 960E is scheduled for Q3 2027. Huawei is also preparing the Ascend 960 DT for Q1 2027, the Ascend 960 PR for Q3 2027, followed by the Ascend 970 in 2028 and Ascend 980 in 2029.
Huawei Atlas 960E SuperPoD: Key Specifications
| Feature | Huawei Atlas 960E SuperPoD |
|---|---|
| Launch | Q3 2027 |
| AI model target | Up to 10 trillion parameters |
| NPO optical engine | Hi-ONE |
| Transmission capacity | 7.2 Tbit/s |
| Maximum Ascend cards | 4,096 |
| FP8 performance | 8 EFLOPS |
| FP4 performance | 16 EFLOPS |
| Optical modules | 5,500 Hi-ONE |
| Replaced 800G modules | Around 48,000 |
| Claimed power reduction | Over 550 kW |
| System availability | 99.8% |
| Interconnect | UnifiedBus / Lingqu |
| Cooling | Fully liquid-cooled |
| Maximum SuperCluster scale | Up to 1 million Ascend processors |
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