China Merchants Securities: Huawei Ascend 960 tape-out accelerated to Q1 2027, NPO technology exceeds expectations

Published Sep 21, 04:57 AM UTC

A research report from China Merchants Securities, published via Zhitong Finance, provides an in-depth analysis of China's domestic AI computing chip supply chain, focusing on Huawei's latest developments. Key findings include that the Ascend 960 chip's design tape-out (DT) has been accelerated from Q4 2027 to Q1 2027, with the production release (PR) also moved forward to Q3 2027. The report highlights the new 'Lingqu' series of 11 chip families covering computing, connectivity, storage, and management. Notably, the Ascend 960 supernode will be the first product to adopt NPO (Narrowband Pluggable Optics) technology, using 5,500 Hi-ONE optical engines to replace 48,000 traditional 800G optical modules, significantly reducing power consumption. The report also details plans for a 4096-card supernode and a million-card cluster, and forecasts future chips: Ascend 970 (2028, 3.6 PFLOPS FP8) and Ascend 980 (2029, 7.2 PFLOPS FP8). The report recommends investment opportunities across the AI computing chain, including foundry, GPU/ASIC, networking chips, optical chips, packaging, testing, equipment, components, and storage. Risks cited include weaker-than-expected end demand, macroeconomic impacts, and slower semiconductor localization progress.

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