Microsoft Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Artificial Intelligence Kevin Scott speaks on the Microsoft Briefing event on the Seattle Convention Center Summit Constructing in Seattle, Washington, on May 21, 2024.
Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images
Microsoft would really like to mainly use its own chips in its data centers in the longer term, the tech giant’s chief technology officer said on Wednesday, in a move which could reduce its reliance on major players like Nvidia and AMD.
Semiconductors and the servers that sit inside data centers have underpinned the event of artificial intelligence models and applications.
Tech giant Nvidia has dominated the space to this point with its graphics processing unit (GPUs), while rival AMD has a smaller slice of the pie.
But major cloud computing players, including Microsoft, have also designed their very own custom chips for specifically for data centers.
Kevin Scott, chief technology officer at Microsoft, laid out the corporate’s strategy around chips for AI during a hearth chat at Italian Tech Week that was moderated by CNBC.
Microsoft primarily uses chips from Nvidia and AMD in its own data centers. The main focus has been on picking the proper silicon — one other shorthand term for semiconductor — that provides “the very best price performance” per chip.
“We’re not religious about what the chips are. And … that has meant the very best price performance solution has been Nvidia for years and years now,” Scott said. “We we’ll literally entertain anything with a purpose to make sure that we have got enough capability to satisfy this demand.”
At the identical time, Microsoft has been using a few of its own chips.
In 2023, Microsoft launched the Azure Maia AI Accelerator which is designed for AI workloads, in addition to the Cobalt CPU. As well as, the firm is reportedly working on its next-generation of semiconductor products. Last week, the U.S. technology giant unveiled recent cooling technology using “microfluids” to unravel the problem of overheating chips.
When asked if the long term plan is to have mainly Microsoft chips within the firm’s own data centers, Scott said: “Absolutely,” adding that the corporate is using “plenty of Microsoft” silicon right away.
The give attention to chips is a component of a method to eventually design a whole system that goes into the info center, Scott said.
“It’s about your entire system design. It is the networks and the cooling and you wish to have the opportunity to have the liberty to make the choices that you should make with a purpose to really optimize your compute to the workload,” Scott said.
Microsoft and its rivals Google and Amazon are designing their very own chips to not only reduce reliance on Nvidia and AMD, but in addition to make their products more efficient for his or her specific requirements.
Compute capability shortage
Tech giants including Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet and Microsoft have committed to greater than $300 billion of capital expenditures this 12 months, with much of that focused on AI investments as they appear to satisfy booming demand for AI.
Scott flagged that there remains to be a shortage of computing capability.
“[A] massive crunch [in compute] might be an understatement,” Scott said. “I feel we now have been in a mode where it has been almost inconceivable to construct capability fast enough since ChatGPT … launched.”
Microsoft has been constructing capability through data centers nevertheless it’s still not enough to satisfy demand, the CTO warned.
“Even our most ambitious forecasts are only turning out to be insufficient regularly. And so … we deployed an incredible amount of capability over the past 12 months and it should be much more over the approaching handful of years,” Scott said.
