Damo: The Huawei Ascend 960 SuperPod uses NPO optical interconnection to maintain the “synchronization with the big market” in the Greater China technology hardware industry

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Morgan Stanley released a research report saying that Huawei announced the Ascend 960 SuperPod artificial intelligence infrastructure at the 2026 Shanghai Huawei Full Connectivity Conference yesterday (17th), using the third-generation near-package optical (NPO) optical interconnection architecture.

The bank believes that Huawei's adoption of NPO technology supports its view that “China is expected to establish a competitive advantage in this new product”; from the Atlas 910C's discrete optics, to the Atlas 950's LPO, to the Atlas 960's NPO, it highlights the rapid evolution of Huawei's optical interconnection technology.

The bank pointed out that the 7.2 Tbps NPO optical engine operates with 36 channels and 200 Gbps per channel, surpassing the 6.4 Tbps and 32 channel interfaces being developed by OIF and other organizations, while reducing communication delays to 10 nanoseconds and reducing power consumption. The Ascend 960 SuperPod can be expanded to 4,096 NPU cards via unifiedbus, providing up to 8 exaflops of FP8 computing power and 1 PB unified HBM.

The bank said that Huawei is also working with China Mobile Research Institute, JD Cloud and more than 20 domestic partners to launch the “OPEN NPO” initiative and optical interconnection multi-source agreement (MSA). The bank's view on the technology hardware industry in Greater China is “In-Line with the Market” (In-Line).