Huawei Unveils Ascend 960 Supernode with Near-Package Optics for Q3 2027 Release
Huawei has unveiled the Ascend 960 Supernode, the world's first AI supernode incorporating Near-Package Optics (NPO) via its Hi-ONE optical engine, scheduled for release in Q3 2027. The system scales up to 4,096 cards within a single supernode to deliver 16 EFLOPS of FP4 performance. By replacing 48,000 traditional 800G optical modules with 5,500 Hi-ONE NPO engines, the system cuts power consumption by over 550 kW and doubles system reliability to 99.8% availability. Using multi-plane topology, these supernodes can scale into massive compute clusters of up to 1 million Ascend accelerators for training multi-trillion parameter AI models. The Ascend 960 Supernode utilizes Huawei's proprietary Lingqu interconnect protocol for unified memory addressing across nodes, alongside a full liquid-cooled orthogonal chassis design. The Hi-ONE NPO engine provides a total transmission capacity of 7.2T and features an integrated built-in light source.
## BACKGROUND
Near-Package Optics (NPO) is an optical interconnect technology that places optical engines on the circuit board adjacent to the main ASIC package, serving as an intermediate step between traditional pluggable optical transceivers and Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) to dramatically improve bandwidth and efficiency. Lingqu (UnifiedBus) is Huawei's custom high-speed interconnect protocol designed to unify intra-chip and multi-node communications, competing directly with interconnect standards such as NVIDIA's NVLink.