Microsoft said on Thursday that it will provide its cloud computing clients with an AMD artificial intelligence processor platform that will rival Nvidia components. Further information will be provided at Microsoft’s Build developer conference the following week.
During the conference, a sneak peek of the upcoming Cobalt 100 custom CPUs will also be unveiled.
Microsoft will sell clusters of the company’s flagship MI300X AI chips from Advanced Micro Devices via its Azure cloud computing service. Customers will have an option to Nvidia’s powerful H100 family of graphics processing units (GPUs), which are in high demand and dominate the data center semiconductor market for AI.
Because the data and computation cannot fit on a single chip, businesses usually need to connect together – or cluster – numerous GPUs in order to execute apps or construct AI models.
AMD has stated that the chips are strong enough to operate and train massive AI models, and the company anticipates $4 billion in sales from AI chips this year.
In addition to Nvidia’s premium AI chips, Microsoft’s cloud computing division offers access to Maia, an own AI chip developed in-house.
Separately, the business said that the Cobalt 100 CPUs, which Microsoft intends to demonstrate next week, perform 40% better than rival processors built using technology from Arm Holdings. Snowflake has started using them, along with others.
Announced in November, the Cobalt chips are being tested to power Teams, Microsoft’s workplace messaging service, and are positioned to rival Amazon.com’s in-house Graviton CPUs.
This week, Amazon announced that Robinhood Markets, a finance company, and social network Pinterest had begun utilizing its Graviton chips.