From The Verge, who seem bound-and-determined to be a serious source for AI news, November 15:
The Azure Maia 100 and Cobalt 100 chips are the first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud infrastructure.
The rumors are true: Microsoft has built its own custom AI chip that can be used to train large language models and potentially avoid a costly reliance on Nvidia. Microsoft has also built its own Arm-based CPU for cloud workloads. Both custom silicon chips are designed to power its Azure data centers and ready the company and its enterprise customers for a future full of AI.
Microsoft’s Azure Maia AI chip and Arm-powered Azure Cobalt CPU are arriving in 2024, on the back of a surge in demand this year for Nvidia’s H100 GPUs that are widely used to train and operate generative image tools and large language models. There’s such high demand for these GPUs that some have even fetched more than $40,000 on eBay.
“Microsoft actually has a long history in silicon development,” explains Rani Borkar, head of Azure hardware systems and infrastructure at Microsoft, in an interview with The Verge. Microsoft collaborated on silicon for the Xbox more than 20 years ago and has even co-engineered chips for its Surface devices. “These efforts are built on that experience,” says Borkar. “In 2017, we began architecting the cloud hardware stack and we began on that journey putting us on track to build our new custom chips.”
The new Azure Maia AI chip and Azure Cobalt CPU are both built in-house at Microsoft, combined with a deep overhaul of its entire cloud server stack to optimize performance, power, and cost. “We are rethinking the cloud infrastructure for the era of AI, and literally optimizing every layer of that infrastructure,” says Borkar....
....MUCH MORE
As we are seeing with Elon Musk and his supercomputer, having the resources to expand into these areas is a huge advantage, leading to both flywheel effect and hyper-Pareto distribution of the spoils:
Flywheel Effect: Why Positive Feedback Loops are a Meta-Competitive Advantage
