Huawei Hi-ONE optical engine heads into Ascend 960 supernode

On September 30, 2026, Leiphone reported that Huawei’s in-house optical engine Hi-ONE will enter the next-generation Ascend 960 supernode using NPO, or Near-Packaged Optics. The report said Hi-ONE was previously shown at CIOE by HiSilicon, which disclosed a bandwidth capability of 7.2T and indicated that the optical engine would be used in Huawei’s next-generation supernode. Huawei described the Ascend 960 system as the world’s first AI computing supernode to adopt NPO. According to the report, the deployment targets a thousand-card-class supernode and would use 5,500 Hi-ONE units to replace 48,000 800G pluggable optical modules. The article explained that as high-speed chip interfaces get faster, longer electrical connections between the electrical chip and the optical engine can cause greater signal attenuation and distortion. Traditional pluggable optics require high-speed electrical signals to travel across a PCB, while CPO, or Co-Packaged Optics, binds the optical engine more tightly to the main chip. Huawei positioned NPO as a middle path balancing bandwidth, latency, and serviceability by shortening the high-speed electrical connection to about 5 centimeters. The report also noted that at Huawei Connect a few days later, more than one optical engine achieved short-distance interconnection, but the provided material ended before giving further details.