SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Huawei's Vice Chairman Eric Xu said on Thursday the company plans to launch the world's most powerful computing power node called the Atlas 950 in the fourth quarter of this year, local media China Star Market reported.

Xu, who also serves as Huawei's rotating chairman, added that Huawei would launch the next generation, Atlas 960, in the fourth quarter of 2027, the online publication reported.

The Atlas 950 and Atlas 960 can support 8,192 and 15,488 Ascend chips, respectively, Xu said.

Chinese authorities have urged firms to prioritise Huawei Ascend AI chips and other domestic alternatives over Nvidia ( NVDA ) chips, which offer comparable computing performance.

Xu said that the systems excel in metrics such as card count, total compute, memory capacity and interconnect bandwidth.