Microsoft has just unveiled its first “in-house” AI chips. The software giant announced the Azure Maia AI gas pedal and the Azure Cobalt ARM processor at the Microsoft Ignite event. The arrival of these chips comes as no surprise, since work in this direction had been rumored for several years. We now know that the Maia AI gas pedal is already being used by OpenAI. Moreover, in its communication, Microsoft is clearly showing its colors in the field of AI, asserting that mastery of its chips represents “a final piece of the puzzle”.
Microsoft is building the infrastructure to support AI innovation, and we’re reinventing every aspect of our data centers to meet our customers’ needs. At the scale at which we operate, it’s important for us to optimize and integrate every layer of the infrastructure stack to maximize performance, diversify our supply chain and give our customers choice in infrastructure. Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Cloud AI Group.
Once the announcements had been dissected, it had to be said that Microsoft provided very little technical information on its chips. We did learn, however, that the Azure Cobalt 100 processor is an ARM SoC built at TSMC using the 5nm node. Microsoft believes that the choice of ARM enables it to achieve maximum “performance per watt” for the company’s data centers. This SoC features a total of 128 Neoverse N2 cores with support for 12-channel DDR5 memory and up to 40% higher performance per core than outgoing ARM server chips. The idea of breaking away from dependence on Nvidia AMD and Intel is laudable (even if Microsoft continues to buy equipment massively from these companies)…But there remains one partner that is increasingly unavoidable (and problematic?): TSMC.
