Opening its Connect 2025 conference, Huawei stressed that computing power is and will continue to be key to the continued roll-out of artificial intelligence (AI) across distributed business infrastructures, especially in China, and used the event to launch a range of computer pods and clusters, as well as interconnect technology to address potential data bottlenecks for large-scale AI computing infrastructure.
In his conference keynote, Groundbreaking SuperPoD Interconnect: Leading a new paradigm for AI infrastructure, Eric Xu, the deputy chairman of the board and rotating chairman of the IT and networking giant, stressed that Huawei’s goal was to sustainably meet long-term computing demand by building SuperPoDs – defined as a single logical machine, made up of multiple physical machines that can learn, think and reason as one – and SuperClusters, with the semiconductor manufacturing process nodes that he said were “practically” available to the Chinese mainland.
During the keynote, Xu unveiled the company’s newest SuperPoD products: the Atlas 950 SuperPoD, with 8,192 Ascend neural processing units (NPUs), and the Atlas 960 SuperPoD, with 15,488 Ascend NPUs.
These two SuperPoDs are claimed to be able to deliver “industry-leading performance” across multiple key metrics, including the number of NPUs, total computing power, memory capacity and interconnect bandwidth. In addition, the company states that based on publicly announced product roadmaps from peers in the industry, Huawei insisted that its SuperPoDs were currently the most powerful in the world, and that they would remain so “for years to come”.
Xu also announced the Atlas 950 SuperCluster (with over 500,000 Ascend NPUs) and Atlas 960 SuperCluster (with over one million Ascend NPUs), which are large-scale computing clusters comprised of multiple Huawei SuperPoDs. These are also poised to outperform all other computing clusters on the market.
With the world’s most powerful SuperPoDs and SuperClusters, Xu asserted that Huawei has what it takes to provide abundant computing power for ongoing, rapid advancements in AI, both now and in the future.
Xu went on to introduce the TaiShan 950 SuperPoD, what the tech developer described as the world’s first general-purpose computing SuperPoD. The platform, combined with Huawei’s distributed GaussDB, is designed to serve as a viable alternative to mainframes and mid-range computers, and also Exadata database servers.
Yet even with the most powerful SuperPoD, there exist a number of networking challenges in high-computing environments, namely the physical limitations of existing cable technology – both optical and copper – to link up massive numbers of chips and SuperPoDs over long distances while maintaining a reliable, high-speed and low-latency connection. This could present a major bottleneck for large-scale AI computing infrastructure.
To address these challenges, Huawei said it had honed its connectivity expertise over the past three decades, and Xu announced UnifiedBus, a “groundbreaking” interconnect protocol for SuperPoDs.
“SuperPoDs and SuperClusters powered by UnifiedBus are our answer to surging demand for computing, both today and tomorrow,” he said. “Our goal is to keep pushing advancements in AI to create greater value.”
Xu also released the technical specifications for UnifiedBus 2.0, in the hope that industry partners will adopt this protocol to develop more UnifiedBus-based products and components, and jointly create an open UnifiedBus ecosystem.
