At HUAWEI CONNECT 2026 in Shanghai, Zhu ZhaoSheng, Director of Computing Strategy at Huawei, stated that the Ascend ecosystem has overcome a key development stage and introduced a roadmap for five-dimensional agent computing for SuperPoDs and SuperClusters.
The presentation focused on primitives for developers rather than commercial cluster graphs. Elements mentioned include the ThinkPro process APIs, the open PTO instruction set, Ascend 950 programming using SIMD plus SIMT, and community access to 10k-NPU scale computing power for partners and independent developers.
Zhu defined agent workloads as the process of stretching time to obtain the first token, interconnect bandwidth, and memory volume, as agents operate at massive scales on long-horizon tasks.
Huawei's five directions of development include transitioning from single-server level development to SuperPoD using detailed, composable APIs. These APIs encompass memory-aware load/save semantics between physical nodes and asynchronous URMA transfers with message semantics for large data blocks.
There has also been a shift from process-oriented runtimes to developing ThinkPro-based agents, where openEuler views ThinkProcess as the fundamental unit of thought, execution, research, and evolution. A shift has occurred from operator styles based solely on SIMD to homogeneous SIMD plus SIMT and Regbase programming on Ascend 950. Furthermore, there is a transition from HiF8 to low-precision HiF4, and from manual operator coding to generation, adaptation, precision tuning, and industrial deployment with the aid of agents.
Within the ecosystem metrics presented during the keynote, the Ascend open-source CANN community has exceeded 5200 monthly active users. Since June, it has entered the ranks of the most active open-source communities in China, with contributions from non-Huawei developers surpassing those from Huawei developers, and over 30,000 lines of code merged daily.
More than 40 large language and multimodal models have undergone preliminary training on Ascend, and Huawei notes integration with major frameworks such as PyTorch. The work on opening the PTO ISA covers over 120 virtual instructions across eight categories—basic operations, data movement, and interconnections—for tile-level abstraction and ensuring operator source code portability across generations with Auto and Manual optimization modes.
Huawei also announced that Ascend communities now provide shared resources at the 10k-NPU scale, including a baseline program of 100 NPU-hours for training and inference experiments, as well as open tools like CANNBot, Model Agent, MindStudio Agent, and Solution Agent. The main focus is on the agent stack and the narrative of the Ascend community's computing power, rather than on Huawei Cloud AgentArts, UnifiedBus product frameworks or the launch timelines for Ascend 950 Lingqu or Ascend 960 SuperPoD, which are covered separately.
