Huawei Targets 62x Bandwidth Advantage Over Nvidia by 2026 with Cluster Strategy

Shanghai – Huawei Technologies Co. has publicly outlined an ambitious three-year plan to challenge Nvidia Corp.'s dominance in the artificial intelligence (AI) chip market, prioritizing the scaling of its Ascend processors through advanced clustering. The strategy, revealed at the annual Huawei Connect conference, aims for a significant bandwidth lead, with the company’s 2026 SuperPod targeting 62 times higher bandwidth than Nvidia's NVL144. This approach seeks to overcome limitations in individual chip performance by integrating thousands of less powerful units.

Huawei's plan revolves around its SuperPod racks, which use a new UnifiedBus fabric to link numerous Ascend chips, allowing them to operate as a unified accelerator. For 2026, the 950 SuperPod is designed to incorporate 8,192 Ascend chips, which Huawei claims will deliver 56.8 times more chips, 6.7 times more compute, 15 times more memory, and 62 times higher bandwidth compared to Nvidia's NVL144. The company also targets 4 Tbps chip links by 2028, significantly surpassing Nvidia's current 1.8 Tbps.

Despite these aggressive targets, Huawei acknowledges that its individual Ascend 950 chip currently offers only about 6% of the raw power of Nvidia's next VR200. To compensate, the company plans to scale clusters up to 15,488 chips now, with future aspirations for systems incorporating as many as 1,000,000 chips. This strategy aims to achieve competitive aggregate performance by leveraging sheer scale and advanced interconnectivity.

A critical challenge for Huawei remains its manufacturing capabilities, particularly after losing access to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) due to U.S. export restrictions. TSMC, the world's leading foundry, is unavailable for Huawei's cutting-edge designs, which has significantly impacted its progress beyond 7nm technology. The tweet highlighted, "Manufacturing is the hard part after losing top foundry access (TSMC), with 7nm progress stalled and the 910D 5nm plan reportedly hurt by poor yield."

Reports indicate that Huawei's planned Ascend 910D chip, intended for a 5nm process, has faced severe setbacks due to poor manufacturing yields, hindering its ability to produce enough usable chips at a reasonable cost. While Huawei surprised the industry with a 7nm processor in its Mate 60 Pro phone in 2023, consistent progress beyond this node has not been publicly demonstrated. The company has also developed its own High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) solutions, HiBL and HiZQ, to reduce reliance on foreign suppliers and optimize memory-processor integration.