Microsoft announced Thursday that it plans to offer its cloud customers a platform with AMD artificial intelligence chips that will compete with components made by Nvidia. Details will be announced at the Build developer conference next week.
The conference will also feature a demonstration of the recent Cobalt 100 custom processors.
Microsoft clusters containing Advanced Micro Devices’ flagship MI300X AI chips will be sold through the Azure cloud computing service. They will provide customers with an alternative to Nvidia’s H100 family of high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs), which dominate the AI data center chip market but can be challenging to obtain due to high demand.
To build AI models or run applications, companies typically need to connect – or cluster – multiple GPUs because data and computation don’t fit on a single CPU.
AMD, which expects AI chip revenue of $4 billion this year, says the chips are powerful enough to train and run enormous AI models.
In addition to Nvidia’s top-of-the-range AI chips, Microsoft’s cloud computing unit offers access to its own in-house AI chips called Maia.
Separately, the Cobalt 100 processors that Microsoft plans to unveil next week offer 40% better performance compared to other Arm Holdings-based processors, the company said. Snowflake and others started using them.
The Cobalt chips, which were announced in November, are being tested to power Teams, Microsoft’s messaging tool for businesses, and are intended to compete with Amazon.com’s internal Graviton processors.
Amazon said this week that social network Pinterest and fintech company Robinhood Markets have started using Graviton chips. (Reporting by Max A. Cherney and Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
