Pat Stemen News Today

The Maia and Cobalt custom chips will be available in Microsoft Cloud, allowing Microsoft to keep more of its cloud infrastructure in-house.

Microsoft has two custom chips designed for AI workloads: the Azure Maia AI Accelerator and Azure Cobalt CPU.

Microsoft, looking to escape the clutches of GPU vendors, is designing chips for training -- and running -- AI models.

Most companies developing AI models, particularly generative AI models like ChatGPT, GPT-4 Turbo and Stable Diffusion, rely heavily on GPUs. Today at its 2023 Ignite conference, Microsoft unveiled two custom-designed, in-house and data center-bound AI chips: the Azure Maia 100 AI Accelerator and the Azure Cobalt 100 CPU. Maia 100 can be used to train and run AI models, while Cobalt 100 is designed to run general purpose workloads.