Microsoft to offer AMD Instinct MI300X AI chips to its cloud computing customers

Microsoft will soon offer AMD's new Instinct MI300X AI accelerator for its cloud computing customers, as well as introducing a preview of its new Cobalt 100 customer processors during its upcoming Build conference this week.

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The new clusters of AMD's flagship Instinct MI300X AI accelerator will be available for purchase by cloud computing customers through Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service, where they'll be an alternative to NVIDIA's family of H100 AI GPUs, which absolutely dominate the AI GPU market, but they're getting harder to purchase in big numbers.

Microsoft will also be offering AMD's new 4th Gen EPYC processors adapted for general purpose, memory-intensive, and compute-optimized virtual machines. Microsoft's new Cobalt 100 processors that the company will show off next week at the Build conference will feature 40% more performance compared to other processors based on the Arm architecture.

The new Cobalt processors were announced back in November 2023, being tested to power Teams, Microsoft's messaging tool for businesses, and will compete against Amazon's in-house Graviton CPUs.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at the time regarding Microsoft's new Cobalt 100 processors: "Since first partnering with Microsoft, we've collaborated to co-design Azure's AI infrastructure at every layer for our models and unprecedented training needs. We were excited when Microsoft first shared their designs for the Maia chip, and we've worked together to refine and test it with our models. Azure's end-to-end AI architecture, now optimized down to the silicon with Maia, paves the way for training more capable models and making those models cheaper for our customers".