Microsoft unveiled two chips at its Ignite conference in Seattle on Wednesday.
The first, its Maia 100 artificial intelligence chip, could compete with Nvidia’s highly sought-after AI graphics processing units. The second, a Cobalt 100 Arm chip, is aimed at general computing tasks and could compete with Intel processors.
Cash-rich technology companies have begun giving their clients more options for cloud infrastructure they can use to run applications. Alibaba, Amazon and Google have done this for years. Microsoft, with about $144 billion in cash at the end of October, had 21.5% cloud market share in 2022, behind only Amazon, according to one estimate.
Virtual-machine instances running on the Cobalt chips will become commercially available through Microsoft’s Azure cloud in 2024, Rani Borkar, a corporate vice president, told CNBC in an interview. She did not provide a timeline for releasing the Maia 100.
Google announced its original tensor processing unit for AI in 2016. Amazon Web Services revealed its Graviton Arm-based chip and Inferentia AI processor in 2018, and it announced Trainium, for training models, in 2020.
Special AI chips from cloud providers might be able to help meet demand when there’s a GPU shortage. But Microsoft and its peers in cloud computing aren’t planning to let companies buy servers containing their chips, unlike Nvidia or AMD.
The company built its chip for AI computing based on customer feedback, Borkar explained.
Microsoft is testing how Maia 100 stands up to the needs of its Bing search engine’s AI chatbot, the GitHub Copilot coding assistant and GPT-3.5-Turbo, a large language model from Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Borkar said. OpenAI has fed its language models with large quantities of information from the internet, and they can generate email messages, summarize documents and answer questions with a few words of human instruction.
The GPT-3.5-Turbo model works in OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant, which became popular soon after becoming…
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