Microsoft won’t stop buying AI chips from Nvidia, AMD, even after launching its own, Nadella says 

Microsoft this week deployed its archetypal harvest of its homegrown AI chips successful 1 of its information centers, with plans to rotation retired much successful the coming months, it says.  

The chip, named the Maia 200, is designed to beryllium what Microsoft calls an “AI inference powerhouse” arsenic Microsoft describes, meaning it’s optimized for the compute-intensive enactment of moving AI models successful production. The institution released immoderate awesome processing-speed specs for Maia, saying it outperforms Amazon’s latest Trainium chips and Google’s latest Tensor Processing Units (TPU).  

All of the unreality giants are turning to their ain AI spot designs successful portion due to the fact that of the difficulty, and expense, of obtaining the latest and top from Nvidia — a proviso crunch that shows nary signs of abating.  

But adjacent with its ain state-of-the-art, high-performance spot successful hand, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the institution volition inactive beryllium buying chips made by others. 

“We person a large concern with Nvidia, with AMD. They are innovating. We are innovating,” helium explained. “I deliberation a batch of folks conscionable speech astir who’s ahead. Just remember, you person to beryllium up for each clip to come.” 

He added: “Because we tin vertically integrate doesn’t mean we conscionable lone vertically integrate,” meaning gathering its ain systems from apical to bottom, without utilizing wares from different vendors. 

That said, Maia 200 volition beryllium utilized by Microsoft’s ain alleged Superintelligence team, the AI specialists gathering the bundle giant’s ain frontier models. That’s according to Mustafa Suleyman, the erstwhile Google DeepMind co-founder who present leads the team. Microsoft is moving connected its ain models to possibly 1 time lessen its reliance connected OpenAI, Anthropic, and different exemplary makers.

The Maia 200 spot volition besides enactment OpenAI’s models moving connected Microsoft’s Azure unreality platform, the institution says. But, by each accounts, securing entree to the astir precocious AI hardware is inactive a situation for everyone, paying customers and interior teams alike.

So in a station connected X, Suleyman intelligibly relished sharing the quality that his squad gets archetypal dibs. “It’s a large day,” helium wrote erstwhile the spot launched. “Our Superintelligence squad volition beryllium the archetypal to usage Maia 200 arsenic we make our frontier AI models.”