Huawei details open-source AI development roadmap at Huawei Connect 2025
Key Takeaways
- Huawei committed to making its entire AI software stack publicly available through open-sourcing by the end of 2025.
- The announcements followed candid acknowledgments from leadership regarding past friction and pain points developers experienced with Ascend infrastructure and tooling.
- Huawei will open interfaces for the CANN compiler and virtual instruction set, while fully open-sourcing other CANN software by December 31, 2025.
- The Mind series application enablement kits and toolchains will be fully open-sourced by the end of 2025.
- The open-sourcing strategy is intended to directly address developer usability issues and encourage community contributions to the Ascend ecosystem.
Open-source development took center stage at Huawei Connect 2025, where the company laid out specific timelines for making its entire AI software stack publicly available by the end of the year. This announcement was framed by a frank admission from Deputy Chairman Eric Xu regarding past challenges and friction developers faced utilizing the Ascend infrastructure, referencing feedback following the release of DeepSeek-R1. The comprehensive open-source strategy is explicitly designed to resolve these usability gaps concerning tooling and ecosystem maturity. The most significant technical commitment involves CANN, Huaweiâs foundational toolkit, where interfaces for the compiler and virtual instruction set will be opened, while other software will be fully open-sourced by December 31, 2025. Furthermore, Huawei committed to fully open-sourcing the daily development tools, including the Mind series application enablement kits and toolchains, by the same year-end deadline, signaling a major shift toward community-driven improvements for its AI hardware ecosystem.
