• The Azure Maia 100 and Cobalt 100 chips are the first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud infrastructure.
• Microsoft is looking for alternatives to expensive Nvidia chips, following the lead of cloud rivals Amazon and Google, which released their own chips years ago.
In the kerfuffle surrounding Microsoft’s involvement in OpenAI’s boardroom saga last week, some of the most salient news out of Microsoft’s Ignite event got a bit lost in the news cycle. However, the announcement that Microsoft is coming to market with its own proprietary microprocessor technology is a big deal for the industry. The company is the last of the big three US hyperscalers to launch bespoke AI chips. Google was the pioneer with its TPU architecture, in 2016. In 2018, Amazon followed with a slew of CPU chips, the Inferentia and Trainium architectures. The company also has the ARM-based Graviton series for AI workloads. Google, which released the fifth generation of its TPU chips during Google Next 2023, is also rumored to be working on the development of ARM-based processors. The company already supports virtual machines powered by ARM-based Altra chips, but doesn’t have its own proprietary technology like Amazon’s in-house ARM-based CPUs.
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