Ascend: Open for All to Build a Vibrant Ecosystem

[Shanghai, China, September 20, 2025] At HUAWEI CONNECT 2025, Zhang Dixuan, President of Huawei's Ascend Computing Business, delivered a keynote speech highlighting Ascend's commitment to driving developer-centric ecosystem growth. He announced the official establishment of the CANN Technical Steering Committee and emphasized Ascend's dedication to accelerate innovation through a strategy of architectural upgrades, layered decoupling, and full open-source collaboration.

Speech by Zhang Dixuan, President of Ascend Computing Business, Huawei

Open Source & Open Software: Empowering Developers to Maximize Ascend's Potential

Ascend is dedicated to open-sourcing its foundational software and co-creating with the industry. To align with developer practices, Ascend is deepening its collaboration with key open source communities and projects, including Triton, PyTorch, vLLM, and verl. By contributing new functions and features back to these communities, Ascend ensures developers have immediate access to the latest technologies.

Through its layered decoupling approach, Ascend empowers developers with a seamless, out-of-the-box experience, enabling them to call models, operators, and low-level resources on demand. The open source runtime capability provides granular control over hardware, allowing developers to maximize performance for specialized needs. The next generation of Ascend products will support both SIMD and SIMT programming paradigms for diverse scenarios.

In partnership with open source communities, Ascend has developed Ascend-based libraries that offer a unified, out-of-the-box experience for developers. In his speech, Mr. Zhang announced, "At the end of September, we will open source the shared memory capability, which enables resource pooling across all on-chip memories within the SuperPoD. This will significantly reduce communication latency compared to traditional Ethernet."

The industry is increasingly focused on low-precision computing, and Ascend is at the forefront of this trend. Ascend has developed the innovative HiFloat8 data format and contributed it to the Global Computing Consortium (GCC). HiFloat8 adds a dynamic dot to standard floating-point formats, allowing for adjustable exponent and mantissa lengths. This unique approach better matches real-world data needs, offers a wider number range similar to FP16, and prevents overflow issues while maintaining precision.

Driven by an unyielding pursuit to optimize inference throughput and minimize latency, Ascend has innovatively disaggregated the deployment of Attention and FFN stages. In the Attention stage, small weight data sizes allow for more KV cache to be stored in memory, which in turn enables larger batch sizes and longer sequences as inputs. For the FFN stage, bigger batches maximize computational efficiency and boost overall model FLOPS utilization (MFU). This revolutionary design intelligently trades communication for memory, improving decode throughput by over 50%.

The CANN Technical Steering Committee made its official debut at the conference. Zhang Dixuan announced: "By late September, all CANN operators will be open-sourced on GitCode. This December, core Ascend software components—including domain-specific libraries, GE, Ascend C, and MindIE—will all go open source, paving the way for global collaboration in setting technical standards and development roadmaps. We are committed to an annual investment of 1,500 PFLOPS computing power and 30,000 development boards to build and share an open source Ascend ecosystem with developers worldwide."

CANN Technical Steering Committee Officially Established

Building a Solid Computing Foundation with Open Hardware for All Scenarios

Ascend adheres to open hardware, empowering partners to craft over 200 hardware products based on open modules and PCIe cards to meet diverse application needs. Zhang Dixuan stated: "Following September's launch of the model inference card for scenario-specific LLM appliances, Ascend will introduce the Atlas 350 Card, Atlas 550 Module and Blade next year. These will enable partners to build more competitive Ascend-based servers and SuperPoDs, collectively fortifying the computing infrastructure."

Empowering Partners to Develop Diverse Products Across Industries

While hardware provides the foundation, applications unlock its potential. Ascend collaborates with software partners to deliver tailored solutions, offering a high-performance computing platform alongside Ascend-optimized models and tools co-developed with LLM partners and open source communities.

Partnering with 20+ ISVs, Ascend delivers tailored solutions across diverse sectors—finance, energy, manufacturing, education, and healthcare. These include cutting-edge applications like credit reporting, electronic health records, power dispatch, cybersecurity, and teaching assistants. Ascend and partners will jointly expand to global markets, with Ascend providing worldwide market development support to seize win-win opportunities in the global AI transformation.

Building Talent Ecosystems, Pioneering Industrial Frontiers

Innovation stems from talent cultivation. Since 2020, Huawei's Ministry of Education-partnered Intelligent Base initiative has integrated Ascend courses into university AI curricula. In 2024, Ascend partnered with top-tier Chinese universities to establish the Kunpeng & Ascend Innovation Centers of Excellence and Innovation Hubs, focusing on high-value scientific research.

"Unleash the code. Unlock the mindset. Unfold the future." Ascend remains committed to pioneering innovation, collaborating with developers worldwide to co-create and thrive within its evolving ecosystem.

Themed All Intelligence, HUAWEI CONNECT 2025 will delve into AI across three dimensions: strategy, technology, and ecosystems. You can expect an in-depth look at our latest strategic initiatives, and we’ll also be unveiling our all-new digital and intelligent infrastructure products, scenario-specific solutions for industries, and development tools. The event will run from September 18 to 20 at the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition & Convention Center and Shanghai Expo Center. For more information, please visit HUAWEI CONNECT 2025 online at www.huawei.com/en/events/huaweiconnect