Microsoft offers cloud customers AMD alternative to Nvidia AI processors

By Max A. Cherney

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Microsoft said on Thursday it plans to offer its cloud computing customers an artificial intelligence chip platform from AMD that will compete with components made by Nvidia, with details to be given at its developer conference Build, next week.

It will also preview the new Cobalt 100 custom processors at the conference.

Microsoft’s Advanced Micro Devices MI300X AI chip clusters will be sold through its Azure cloud computing service. They will give their customers an alternative to Nvidia’s H100 family of powerful graphics processing units (GPUs), which dominate the AI ​​data center chip market but can be difficult to obtain due to high demand.

To build AI models or run applications, companies typically must cluster – or cluster – multiple GPUs because data and computation won’t fit on a single processor.

AMD, which expects $4 billion in revenue from AI chips this year, has said the chips are powerful enough to train and run large AI models.

In addition to Nvidia’s cutting-edge AI chips, Microsoft’s cloud computing unit sells access to its own in-house AI chips, called Maia.

Separately, the Cobalt 100 processors that Microsoft plans to introduce next week offer 40% better performance over other processors based on Arm Holdings’ technology, the company said. Snowflake and others began using them.

The Cobalt chips, announced in November, are being tested to power Teams, Microsoft’s messaging tool for businesses, and positioned to compete with in-house Graviton CPUs made by Amazon.com.

(Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)