Microsoft unveiled two custom silicon products at its November 2023 Ignite conference: the Maia 100 AI processor designed to compete with Nvidia GPUs, and the Cobalt 100 ARM-based chip for general compute tasks. Maia is in internal testing against GPT-3.5-Turbo, Bing Copilot, and GitHub Copilot; no commercial release date was announced. Cobalt is slated for Azure availability in 2024 and has demonstrated 40% performance gains over Ampere-based ARM chips in Teams and Azure SQL Database testing. This move formalizes hyperscaler vertical integration into silicon and reflects Microsoft's response to GPU supply constraints and vendor lock-in risk, with longer gestation timelines for AI inference chips than for general-purpose compute alternatives.
258 other tracked developments touching the same claims.