iFlytek to unveil Ascend 950-trained flagship LLM at 1024 event
iFlytek plans to announce a new flagship general-purpose large model trained on Huawei's Ascend 950 at its October 24 1024 Developer Festival, a bid to escape the domestic-compute bottleneck. The article says Spark has been the only mainstream LLM trained entirely on Chinese chips for three years, but Ascend 910B's memory and bandwidth left its long-context and complex-code training about 5x less efficient than Nvidia's H200; Ascend 950's larger memory and bandwidth raise theoretical efficiency against H200 to 65%–85%, giving Spark a base for top-tier models. Commercially, the piece notes H1 2026 revenue of RMB 11.623 billion, up 6.52% year on year, a RMB 204 million net loss attributable to shareholders, a 2.65% decline in government-business revenue, and chairman Liu Qingfeng's August admission that iFlytek was visibly absent from the code and agent boom. The event is also expected to cover funding progress for the spun-out Ciyuan Xinghuo unit and chip and supernode plans.
If the Ascend 950-based model closes iFlytek's gap in code and agent capabilities, it could return the company to China's top model tier; a single launch, however, will not immediately change its commercial position.