Microsoft partners with AMD to offer Cobalt 100 processors, announced at Build 2024 conference.

Microsoft, the second largest cloud service provider, has announced several innovations to be unveiled at the Build developer conference next week. The company will introduce a new platform featuring AMD's artificial intelligence chips as a competitive alternative to Nvidia's dominant GPUs in the cloud computing market.

Microsoft's Azure cloud service will integrate clusters of AMD's MI300X AI chips, offering an alternative to Nvidia's high-demand H100 GPUs, which currently lead the data center AI chip market. AI model training and application operations often require the use of multiple GPUs due to the extensive data and computational needs. AMD has projected that it will generate $4 billion in AI chip revenue this year and claims that its MI300X chips are powerful tools for managing large AI models. In addition to Nvidia's top-tier AI chips, Microsoft's cloud computing unit already provides access to its proprietary AI chips, known as Maia.

Microsoft will also launch a preview of its new custom Cobalt 100 processors during the conference. These chips, introduced last November, are currently being tested to support Microsoft Teams, the company's business messaging tool. The forthcoming Cobalt 100 processors promise a 40 percent performance boost over other Arm-based processors and aim to compete with Amazon's in-house Graviton CPUs. The processors are already being adopted by companies like Snowflake.

AMD's growing influence in the computing market is further evidenced by its recent performance on industry benchmarks. The company now powers 157 supercomputers on the latest Top500 list, representing a 29 percent increase from the previous year, and 157 systems on the Green500 list of the most efficient supercomputers in the world.