Ascend Thousand-Card Node Goes Live in Wuhan
Delivery times collapsed from thirteen months to about one, which is the number that matters.
Huawei put its Ascend 950 thousand-card supernode into service in Wuhan on 9 November 2026 at its Hubei partner conference, alongside the release of regional industry agent solutions and the formation of a local HarmonyOS industry consortium. The milestone has a second date: the country’s first 1,024-card liquid-cooled Ascend 950DT cluster, backed by Hubei venture capital, was lit up in the same city on 29 October. The interval from launch to customer deployment fell from thirteen months on the 910C generation to roughly one on the 950. IDC puts Ascend at 28% of China’s AI accelerator market in the first half of 2026 against Nvidia’s 34%. A reported DeepSeek order for 160,000 Ascend 950DT chips worth about $2.56 billion has not been confirmed by either company, and there is no verified case of a Chinese frontier model completing a from-scratch pretraining run on Ascend.