Huawei Plans to Expand Ascend Chip Series Internationally

Introducing the powerful new Ascend 950 series designed for international markets.

Huawei is set to make significant changes in the global AI competition by expanding its Ascend chip series outside of China. The company plans to officially launch these advanced AI devices, which have previously been mainly targeted at the domestic market, in South Korea starting from 2026.

📌 Key Takeaways

✓Huawei plans to launch advanced AI chips outside China for the first time.
✓The company will introduce Ascend 950 series to South Korean market by 2026.
✓Two chip variants cater to different computational needs and memory bandwidth requirements.
✓HarmonyOS will also be introduced in South Korea targeting enterprise users.

New International Strategy

Balian Wang, CEO of Huawei’s Korean subsidiary, confirmed during an event in Seoul that his company will provide AI computing cards and data center solutions to South Korean customers beginning next year. He emphasized that this approach isn’t solely about selling chips; instead, it includes developing end-to-end systems that incorporate network infrastructure, storage solutions, and high-performance computing.

Ascend 950 Series Details

The Ascend 950 series planned for the South Korean market will consist of two variants: Ascend 950PR and Ascend 950DT. The former is designed to handle resource-intensive tasks like recommendation engines and data preprocessing, while the latter offers high memory bandwidth to optimize training and inference processes for large language models.

HarmonyOS to Follow

In addition to hardware, Huawei intends to offer its open-source HarmonyOS operating system to South Korean enterprise users. Though it may not see immediate success in the smartphone market, the company aims to create a new ecosystem through industrial applications and data center software.

This aggressive expansion move by Huawei is seen as an effort to establish itself as a strong alternative to Nvidia’s dominance in the field. However, one of the biggest questions for the coming period will be whether Huawei can meet the growing global demand with its production capacity.