Morgan Stanley: Huawei Ascend 960 SuperPoD adopts NPO optical interconnect; maintains "In-Line" rating for Greater China technology hardware industry

Morgan Stanley released a research report stating that Huawei yesterday (the 17th) unveiled the Ascend 960 SuperPoD AI infrastructure at the Huawei Connect 2026 in Shanghai, featuring a third-generation optical interconnect architecture based on near-package optics (NPO). The bank believes that Huawei's adoption of NPO technology supports its view that "China is expected to establish a competitive advantage in this new product"; the progression from discrete optics in Atlas 910C, to LPO in Atlas 950, and then to NPO in Atlas 960 highlights the rapid evolution of Huawei's optical interconnect technology. The bank noted that the 7.2 Tbps NPO optical engine operates with 36 channels at 200 Gbps per channel, surpassing the 6.4 Tbps, 32-channel interface being developed by organizations such as OIF, while reducing communication latency to 10 nanoseconds and lowering power consumption. The Ascend 960 SuperPoD can scale up to 4,096 NPU cards via UnifiedBus, delivering up to 8 Exaflops of FP8 compute and 1 PB of unified HBM. The bank stated that Huawei also joined hands with China Mobile Limited Research Institute, JD Cloud, and more than 20 domestic partners to launch the "OPEN NPO" initiative and a multi-source agreement (MSA) for optical interconnect. The bank's view on the Greater China technology hardware industry is "In-Line."