Microsoft has announced a pair of new chips made by itself. Due to the high cost of AI technology, various technology companies have started making chips themselves. Microsoft has now entered the list.
Microsoft has no plans to sell ready-made chips. Instead, they plan to use them for various purposes, including increasing the speed of subscription-based software products in their Azure cloud computing service.
In addition to the speed of AI computing, Microsoft released a chip called Maia at the Ignite Developer Conference in Seattle to increase the capacity of the ‘Copilot’ service built for commercial customers for a monthly subscription of $30. These Maia chips are designed to run significant language AI models.
Tech giants like Microsoft and Alphabet need help to cover the enormous cost of their AI technology, and that could be up to 10 times more than traditional services like search engines.
Top company officials have said that Microsoft is planning to bring almost all its activities under a bunch of basic AI models to reduce costs.
“We think this gives us a way that we can provide better solutions to our customers that are faster and lower cost and higher quality,” said Scott Guthrie, the executive vice president of Microsoft’s cloud and AI group, reported to Reuters.
Reuters reported that another chip called Cobalt was announced on Tuesday to prevent one of its main rivals, Amazon, and cut domestic costs.
With this new chip designed by Arm, Microsoft has already started testing the capabilities of their Teams software.
However, Guthrie stated that his business is considering providing direct access to Cobalt to compete with Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) self-managed “Graviton” series.
AWS’s developer conference is due next month, and a company spokeswoman said the Graviton chip currently has 50,000 customers.
“AWS will continue to innovate to deliver future generations of AWS-designed chips to deliver even better price-performance for whatever customer workloads require,” the spokesman said after Microsoft announced its chip.
Previously, Baidu announced its working with Huawei to making its own chip after pressures from the US.