Huawei Unveils Ambitious AI Chip Roadmap with Annual Upgrades

Chinese tech giant Huawei is accelerating its push to develop an alternative to Nvidia's AI chips. The company will unveil its Ascend 960 chip at a conference in Shanghai this week, with plans for annual upgrades that double computing power and link up to 1 million AI processors.

Huawei aims to build an ecosystem from individual chips to computing centers containing hundreds of thousands or even 1 million processors. This would give China's AI industry an infrastructure on which it can continue to develop without depending on the US.

The company has already developed 11 chips based on its UnifiedBus technology and is planning a new chip every year, with each generation expected to deliver twice the computing power of its predecessor.