Huawei

What Huawei is

Huawei is a Chinese information and communications technology company, founded in 1987 in Shenzhen by Ren Zhengfei. The company says it has about 213,000 employees and operates in more than 170 countries and regions; it also says it is 100% privately owned by its employees.^[1] Its 2025 annual report gives revenue of CNY 880.9 billion and net profit of CNY 68 billion.^[6]

Research and chip design

A large share of the company's resources goes into research. The 2025 annual report states R&D spending of CNY 192.3 billion, equal to 21.8% of revenue, and Huawei says about 53.7% of its workforce works in R&D. Its chips are designed by its subsidiary HiSilicon.^[6]

Announcing an AI strategy

Huawei set out its AI plans in public at HUAWEI CONNECT 2018 in Shanghai on 10 October 2018. There Rotating Chairman Eric Xu announced the company's AI strategy and its Ascend series of AI chips, presented as part of a "full-stack, all-scenario" AI portfolio — a way of saying the company meant to supply not a single component but chips, software and the systems built around them.^[3]

The hardware arrived in steps. Huawei launched the Ascend 310 chip in 2018, and in August 2019 it brought out the Ascend 910 training chip together with the MindSpore framework.^[2] Huawei says the Ascend 910C became better known in 2025 as the company scaled up deployment of its Atlas 900 A3 SuperPoD.^[2]

Export restrictions

On 15 May 2019 the US Department of Commerce added Huawei and 70 of its affiliates to the Entity List, restricting its access to US technology.^[2] The Entity List is a US export-control instrument: a party placed on it faces limits on which US technology it may obtain.

Chips and systems

In September 2025 Huawei announced the Ascend 950, 960 and 970 chip series, a plan covering the next three years: the Ascend 950DT is due in the fourth quarter of 2026 and the Ascend 960 in the fourth quarter of 2027, and the company pledged to open-source its CANN software.^[5]

At HUAWEI CONNECT 2025 on 18 September 2025 it also unveiled the Atlas 950 SuperPoD with 8,192 Ascend NPUs and the Atlas 960 SuperPoD with 15,488, together with SuperClusters of over 500,000 and over one million NPUs.^[4]

How the pieces fit together

An NPU (neural processing unit) is a processor built for the kind of arithmetic neural networks do — very large numbers of multiply-and-add operations. A SuperPoD is a way of wiring many such processors together so that they can be used as one machine; a SuperCluster extends the same idea to a much larger collection of those pods. On the software side, MindSpore is the framework in which models are written, and CANN is the software Huawei supplies for its Ascend chips.

Read together, the announcements describe a stack that runs from chip design at HiSilicon, through the Ascend chips themselves, to the software and to the racks and clusters built from them. They also describe a schedule: the 2025 announcements named chips due in 2026 and 2027, so the plan reaches several generations ahead in public. The Ascend 910C is a case of the same pattern — a chip that Huawei says became better known only once the larger Atlas 900 A3 SuperPoD system around it was deployed at scale.^[2]