According to sources familiar with customer pricing offers, Huawei and Cambricon have increased the estimated prices for current and future artificial intelligence accelerator cards amid rising costs for high-performance memory (HBM).
This report provides an update on the supply chain and product release schedule: HBM stack components now constitute a significant portion of the cost of finished cards. Meanwhile, Huawei's stated release date for the Ascend 950DT in the fourth quarter of 2026 remains unchanged.
Reuters reported that Huawei has raised the estimated price of its Ascend 950DT accelerator above 250,000 yuan. This is approximately 20%–50% higher than the prices quoted about two months ago, depending on contract terms. Bloomberg separately noted that the projected prices have risen by about 60% in three months, reaching around 250,000 yuan, with one source comparing this price to the Nvidia B200 for similar multi-card deals.
Both publications emphasize that the final cost still depends on the order volume and how many components customers purchase, including boards, network equipment, and other auxiliary elements. Huawei stated that the 950DT, which is the most advanced Ascend product for high-load decoding model development and inference, is still scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026. The company described proprietary memory stacks for the Ascend 950 series—HiBL 1.0 for 950PR and HiZQ 2.0 for 950DT—but did not disclose details about the memory production.
Cambricon also revised the price for its next model, preliminarily named 690, raising it by approximately 20%–30% compared to the level indicated two months ago, although the exact amount in yuan was not disclosed. A similar price increase is also observed among smaller competitors MetaX and Iluvatar. Older Huawei boards have also seen changes: the Ascend 950PR has become more expensive, rising from approximately 60,000 yuan at the beginning of the year to over 80,000 yuan, and the Ascend 910C has increased from about 90,000 yuan to over 110,000 yuan, according to sources.
The main limiting factor is memory. Supplies of advanced HBM remain concentrated among a small number of global suppliers, and Chinese accelerator manufacturers are increasingly forced to use 'gray market' channels with higher costs, which directly affects the final card price. Huawei, Cambricon, MetaX, and Iluvatar did not comment on the pricing discussion for the publications.
As additional information, Iluvatar has roughly doubled its GPU supply to ByteDance to 100,000 units this year, according to one Reuters source, and redirected internal GPUs to meet this demand. Sources also reported that Huawei remains the largest domestic supplier for ByteDance, followed by Cambricon and Iluvatar. For buyers planning clusters for 2026, the immediate signal is the higher estimated prices and tighter memory logistics before the Q4 window for the Ascend 950DT, rather than a change in the product development plan.
