Guotai Haitong: Huawei Ascend 960 completes R&D ahead of schedule; maintains "Overweight" rating on the computer sector.

Guotai Haitong released a research report maintaining an "Overweight" rating on the computer sector. Last week, Z.AI completed approximately RMB 33.5 billion in financing, with about 60% of the funds to be used for next-generation model R&D and computing infrastructure construction; Huawei's Ascend 960 completed R&D preparation ahead of schedule and is planned for launch in 2027; Kimi released a financial industry solution integrating data, skills, and compliance capabilities. Guotai Haitong's main views are as follows: Z.AI secured RMB 33.5 billion in financing, with 60% of funds directed toward next-generation models and computing infrastructure. On September 13, Z.AI announced the completion of approximately USD 5 billion (approximately RMB 33.54 billion) in financing, including approximately USD 2 billion in share placement and approximately USD 3 billion in convertible bonds; approximately 60% of the net proceeds will be used for next-generation GLM foundation models, fully self-trained system R&D, and large-scale training, production inference, and computing infrastructure construction, with a focus on exploring recursive self-improvement (RSI). Kimi released a financial industry solution integrating data, skills, and compliance capabilities. Kimi launched a solution for the financial industry, covering 10+ authoritative data sources, 9 professional financial skills, and 5 security compliance measures, capable of supporting tasks such as position morning reports, earnings commentary, project screening, in-depth research, and portfolio review. The solution accesses data from Wind, East Money Information, S&P Global, and others through MCP, and encapsulates processes such as financial modeling, research reports, institutional PPTs, and performance commentary as skills; case studies show that financial modeling manpower input can be reduced from 57 person-days to 0.51 person-day, and industry in-depth research cycles can be shortened from 1020 days to approximately 2 days. Huawei's Ascend 960 completed R&D ahead of schedule, with super nodes introducing NPO optical engines. On September 17, Huawei announced that the Ascend 960 series completed R&D preparation ahead of schedule, with overall performance doubled; the Ascend 960DT is planned for launch in Q1 2027, three quarters ahead of the original plan, with FP8 computing power reaching 2 PFLOPS, memory access capacity of 288GB, and bandwidth of 9.6TB/s. Meanwhile, Huawei released super nodes based on the Ascend 960, adopting NPO near-packaged optical engines and the "Lingqu UnifiedBus + Hi-ONE" architecture, with Atlas 860 and 960 super nodes planned for market launch in Q2 and Q3 2027, respectively. Risk warnings: Technology development may fall short of expectations, and company business expansion may fall short of expectations.