Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)announced plans on Thursday to offer its cloud computing customers a selection of AMD artificial intelligence chips, providing an alternative to Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) processors. The details of this offering will be revealed at its Build developer conference next week.
These AMD AI chips, specifically the flagship MI300X, will be available through Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service, offering customers an alternative to Nvidia’s H100 GPUs, which currently dominate the data center chip market for AI. The move aims to address the high demand for Nvidia components.
Traditionally, companies need to cluster multiple GPUs together to build AI models or run applications due to the volume of data and computation required. AMD’s AI chips are touted to be powerful enough to handle large AI models effectively, with an expected revenue of $4 billion from AI chip sales this year.
In addition to offering Nvidia’s AI chips, Microsoft’s cloud unit also provides access to its proprietary AI chips named Maia.
Furthermore, Microsoft plans to unveil a preview of its new Cobalt 100 custom processors at the conference. These processors are said to offer a 40% performance improvement over other processors based on Arm Holdings’ technology. Snowflake and other companies have already begun utilizing them.
The Cobalt chips, announced in November, are currently being tested for use in powering Teams, Microsoft’s business messaging tool, and are positioned to compete with Amazon.com’s in-house Graviton CPUs.
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