TMTPOST – Xu Zhijun, the helmsman for Huawei’s artificial intelligence strategy, finally spoke the words he had been holding in for six years.
At the 2025 Huawei Connect Conference in Shanghai, as the lights in the venue gradually dimmed and the word “Ascend” appeared on the big screen, there was no thunderous applause or dramatic cheers as one might expect. Some people held their breath, others had tears in their eyes. Everyone knew that one day Ascend would return publicly, but when that moment truly came, the overwhelming emotion was not excitement — it was deep reflection.
Last Thursday Huawei unveiled a comprehensive roadmap for its AI chips over the coming years — a moment that marked over 2,000 days and nights since the release of the Ascend 310 chip in 2018 and the Ascend 910 chip in 2019.
In the spring of 2019, U.S. sanctions pushed Huawei's supply chain to its limit almost overnight. At the time, Huawei remained cautiously optimistic, believing the impact wouldn’t last. At the 2019 Huawei Connect Conference, the company continued with the commercial release of the Ascend 910 chip as scheduled, still maintaining an air of calm confidence.
But the pressure had already crept into every corner. Xu recalled, “Given the limited inventory of Ascend 910 chips at the time, we didn’t dare sell them to internet customers — only to customers in key national industries and public services.”
The sanctions were like a sudden storm, abruptly halting Huawei’s upward momentum. From glory to isolation, from applause to doubt — Huawei’s chip journey was, in the eyes of many, pronounced dead.
What it truly cost to overcome the greatest challenge in its history — no one but Huawei will ever know.
To the outside world, Huawei was represented by the “comeback” Mate 60 smartphone, the HarmonyOS, or the enterprise tools like MetaERP, GaussDB, and other internal middleware that kept the company’s operations running.
But behind the scenes, many Huawei employees were lying low and quietly preparing for a comeback. Teams across HiSilicon, cloud computing, data centers, and optical communications were all eagerly waiting for their moment to return to the front line. AI computing power — this was the battlefield Huawei was truly aiming for.
In March this year, Huawei officially launched the Atlas 900 SuperNode, which can be seen as a preview of Huawei’s AI strategy. Fully configured, it supports 384 chips. With 384 Ascend 910C chips, it can operate like a single computer and delivers a peak computing power of 300 PFLOPS. As of now, Atlas 900 remains the world’s most powerful supernode in terms of computing power.
The CloudMatrix 384 supernode is a cloud service instance built by Huawei Cloud based on the Atlas 900 supernode and is already being widely used for training and inference of large AI models.
Independent analytics firm SemiAnalysis published an article titled “Huawei AI CloudMatrix 384 – China’s Answer to Nvidia GB200 NVL72”, concluding that while Huawei’s chip technology is one generation behind, its independently developed cloud-based supercomputing solution — CloudMatrix 384 — is actually a generation ahead of current commercial products from Nvidia and AMD. It directly benchmarks Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 system and shows technical advantages over Nvidia’s rack-scale solutions in several key metrics. “This solution competes directly with the GB200 NVL72, and in some metrics is more advanced than Nvidia’s rack-scale solution. The engineering advantage is at the system level, not just at the chip level, with innovation at the networking, optics, and software layers,” says the article.
“In the past, Intel allowed us to use their CPU chip interconnect protocols, but later that was also banned. From optical components to optical modules, from interconnect protocols to interconnect chips — we had to redefine and redesign everything ourselves to make it work. Some overseas companies have been trying to replicate our supernode system, researching how we managed to build it,” said Xu, in his first interview after U.S. sanctions in 2019 with the media, including AsianFin and a few other media outlets.
