Microsoft unveils own chips to cut reliance on rivals

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled two custom-designed chips and systems at its Ignite 2023 event in Seattle. The move will help the Redmond company reduce its dependence on artificial intelligence (AI) chips from companies like Nvidia, leverage the investment it has made in OpenAI, and stave off competition from chipmakers like Intel and AMD.

- Leslie D'Monte

While Microsoft’s Azure Maia AI Accelerator has been optimized for AI- and generative AI-specific tasks, its Azure Cobalt CPU (central processing unit) is an Arm-based processor that will cater to general-purpose tasks on Microsoft Cloud.

Microsoft has reportedly been working on developing an AI chip since 2019. Code-named Athena internally, the AI chip was also made available to a small group of Microsoft and OpenAI employees for testing, but Microsoft never officially confirmed the development. In a July 2021 blog, Microsoft described ‘Project Maia’ as a deep learning framework that plays chess to explore the relationship between humans and AI.

For Maia, the company used a deep reinforcement learning neural network that was earlier used to predict the optimal move for a given chess board position and retrained it to predict what a human player would do. Microsoft had then said that "The larger vision of Maia is to create a more productive relationship between humans and AI in chess, with the hope of applying these learnings to other domains".

Maia, in its current avatar, has already been tested by Microsoft-backed OpenAI. According to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “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."