Huawei Reveals Kungpeng 950 & 960 CPU Roadmap for General-Purpose Computing
During its Huawei Connect 2025 event, the company announced the new Kungpeng 950 and 960 series chips, which together form the next-generation infrastructure for general-purpose computing. Significant improvements will be brought to core counts and performance capabilities with this roadmap, signifying a future in HPC and AI.
The Kungpeng 950 Series 192 Cores by Q4 2026
Completion is promised for the fourth quarter of 2026, and these chips will make use of the Unix-Core architecture in dual-threaded implementations and will be produced in two general formats or "types":
- Super Variant: 96 cores / 192 threads.
- High-Density Variant: 192 cores / 384 threads.
These chips are supported and compatible with the next-generation Huawei SuperPods.
The Kungpeng 960 Series Over 256 Cores Arriving Q1 2028
Following the 950, it is planned at the end of Q1 2028 to launch the Kungpeng 960 series, which will improve performance corewise by 50 percent over the 950. It is also to be released in two versions:
- High-Performance Variant: 96 cores / 192 threads for AI hosts and databases.
- High-Density Variant: Over 256 cores / 512 threads, for virtualization, containers, and big data warehouses optimized.
Powering Huawei's Next-Generation SuperPods
These Kungpeng CPUs will form the core of Huawei's upcoming Atlas SuperPods and TaiShan SuperNodes. The specifications of this infrastructure are as follows:
Atlas 950 SuperPod
- Accelerators: 8,192 Ascend 950 Accelerators
- Compute Power: Up to 8 Exaflops of FP8 computing
- Memory: Up to 1,152 TB
- Bandwidth: Up to 16.3 PB/s
Atlas 960 SuperPod
- Accelerators: 15,488 Ascend 960/950DT Accelerators
- Computing Capacity: Up to 30 Exaflops of FP8 and 60 Exaflops of FP4 compute
- Bandwidth: Latency up to 434 PB/s
TaiShan 950 SuperNode
- Nodes: 16 nodes in total
- CPUs: 32 Kungpeng 950 series CPUs
- Memory: Up to 48 TB
Strategic Importance for Domestic Hardware
The development of the Kungpeng series follows the great strategy of China, using local hardware in its data centers and AI clusters. The push creates source value for many local manufacturers such as Huawei to propel their chip roadmaps quickly. Upcoming releases of the Kungpeng series are evidence that Huawei continues to create competitive domestic alternatives for foreign chip solutions in a growing Chinese market.
