At a recent tech event, Huawei provided details on a new artificial intelligence model and a roadmap for its Kunpeng processor family. The announcements, which emerged from the company’s annual Connect 2025 conference, offer a look at Huawei’s development efforts in both AI software and high-end computing hardware. They highlight the company’s ambitious plans regarding server CPUs, aiming to attack Intel and AMD.
Censored DeepSeek AI that reflects “socialist values”
First, Huawei announced a new AI model with a specific focus on safety. In collaboration with China’s Zhejiang University, the company has co-developed a model called DeepSeek-R1-Safe. This new model is a tweaked version of DeepSeek’s open-source model. It aims to comply with domestic regulations that require AI models to reflect “socialist values.” According to Huawei, the model is nearly “100% successful” in blocking common “harmful” topics, including toxic and illegal speech. In other words, this version is censored to avoid touching on sensitive political topics for China.
The model’s defense capability against more disguised attacks and role-playing scenarios reportedly reached 83%. This performance figure puts it between 8% and 15% ahead of other concurrent models like Alibaba’s Qwen-235B and the original DeepSeek-R1-671B under the same testing conditions. Huawei added that the new model exhibited less than a 1% performance degradation compared to the original, which is a significant technical achievement. 1,000 of Huawei’s own Ascend AI chips supported the development of the model.
Huawei Kunpeng processor roadmap, including monstrous 256-core one
In a separate announcement, Huawei outlined an ambitious roadmap for its Kunpeng processor family. This plan details new CPUs intended for high-end computing, positioning them as competitors to chips like Intel’s Xeon and AMD’s EPYC. The company plans to release the Kunpeng 950 processor in the first quarter of 2026. This chip will be available in two distinct models: one with 96 cores and 192 threads, and another with 192 cores and 384 threads. These processors aim to support the TaiShan 950 SuperPoD, which is an option to replace legacy mainframes and midrange computers—particularly in the financial sector.
Looking further ahead, Huawei also confirmed plans for a new 256-core Kunpeng processor . The firm could launch this chip during the first quarter of 2028. It intends for heavy-duty workloads like virtualization, containers, big data, and warehouse management. Another model scheduled for the same timeframe will focus on higher single-core performance. This model has a reported improvement of more than 50% for AI and database use cases. Benchmarks from a 256-core Kunpeng setup reportedly achieved 4.8 million transactions per minute with 768 connections, illustrating its potential for large-scale deployments.
