Microsoft’s most important announcement in years: the cloud giant is developing its own AI chips

Microsoft is substantiating its ambitions in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) by developing its own chips for such software. The software giant could thus become more independent of the semiconductor market and at the same time better adapt devices to its AI programs.

The chip called Maia 100 is intended, among other things, to make the creation of AI content more efficient, Microsoft announced on Wednesday. It will be available to Microsoft customers in the group’s data centers from next year.

A second chip developed by Microsoft will also be introduced, which is intended for general tasks in data centers. This processor, called Cobalt 100, runs on architectures from chip designer Arm, which can also be found in almost all smartphones.

Microsoft is leaning heavily on artificial intelligence and has signed a multibillion-dollar pact with ChatGPT inventor OpenAI to integrate its technology into its own products. When it comes to chips for artificial intelligence applications, systems from semiconductor specialist Nvidia are currently the benchmark, leading to heated demand for them. Nvidia can therefore dictate prices and recently made billions in profits. With its own custom AI chips, Microsoft is trying to reduce this costly and dangerous dependence on the king of AI chips.

(oli/sda/dpa)