Microsoft’s Maia AI, Azure Cobalt chips to rev up efficiency, performance
After months of speculation that Microsoft was developing its own semiconductors, the company at its annual Ignite conference Wednesday took the covers off two new custom chips, dubbed the Maia AI Accelerator and the Azure Cobalt CPU, which target generative AI and cloud computing workloads, respectively.
The new Maia 100 AI Accelerator, according to Microsoft, will power some of the company's heaviest internal AI workloads running on Azure, including OpenAI’s model training and inferencing workloads.