Huawei claims to be taking the competition in the rack-scale segment directly to NVIDIA's ground, as their latest announcement includes unveiling cutting-edge AI clusters.
Huawei's Atlas 950 SuperPoD Is Claimed To Compete With NVIDIA's Rubin NVL144 & NVL572 Configurations
The Chinese AI firm has been at the forefront of competing with NVIDIA in China's AI market, particularly with rack-scale solutions. Huawei announced its CloudMatrix 384 AI system a few months ago, which was reportedly to have surpassed NVIDIA's Blackwell AI system. Now, at the Huawei Connect 2025, the firm has announced new iterations of its 'SuperPoD' AI clusters. These will be the Atlas 950 and the Atlas 960, with the earlier one featuring the new Ascend AI chips, and interestingly, will compete with NVIDIA's Rubin lineup. We'll talk about the Atlas 950 Super Cluster ahead.
Diving a bit into the specifications reported by Huawei, it is claimed that the Atlas 950 SuperPoD will feature 8,192 of the Ascend 950 AI chips, and they will bring in a cumulative performance of eight EFLOPS FP8 and 16 EFLOPS FP16 with a total interconnect bandwidth of a whopping 16.3 PB/s, which are huge figures. Based on these on-paper specifications, the SuperPoD is expected to be on-par with NVIDIA's NVL144 Vera Rubin AI rack, which means Huawei already has plans to level the competition with Team Green next year.
Now, Huawei plans to use the above Atlas 950 SuperPoD AI clusters, join them together to create the Atlas 950 SuperCluster, which will feature a whopping 524,288 of the Ascend 950 AI chips, which is how the Chinese firm plans to bring such power onboard. Huawei claims that the Atlas 950 SuperPoD will be the world's largest AI cluster, in terms of the chips onboard, since systems with 500K to 1 million 'dedicated' AI chips onboard is a rare feat.
Huawei also announced the Atlas 950 SuperCluster and Atlas 960 SuperCluster, which can scale up to support between 500,000 and 1 million processors, making them the “largest AI compute clusters” in the world, the company said.
- SCMP
Huawei has managed to reach such a high level of figures because the Chinese firm doesn't have to consider performance efficiency or cluster pricing; rather, it relies on squeezing out immense computing power to compete against Western alternatives. We are yet unaware of the complete specifications of Huawei's new AI clusters, but considering that it has 500K AI chips onboard, the power consumption will be phenomenal to say the least.
There are many caveats to such announcements, but Huawei seems to be making them to ensure that it meets domestic computing demand. It is safe to say that Chinese AI firms are giving their all to reduce their dominance on the Western tech stack.
About the author: Muhammad Zuhair is a hardware and technology reporter for Wccftech, specializing in the semiconductor industry and the complex interplay between technology, manufacturing, and geopolitics. His coverage focuses on the corporate strategies and technological roadmaps of industry giants like TSMC, NVIDIA, Samsung, and Intel. Zuhair's expertise lies in deconstructing complex topics such as fabrication nodes (e.g., 2nm process), the economic impact of policies like the CHIPS Act, and the strategic development of AI infrastructure from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel.
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