Microsoft is getting closer to announcing plans to develop its own generative AI processors. A new report claims that the reveal could happen as part of Microsoft’s Ignite 2023 developer conference. This news comes from The Information, citing an unnamed source. However, no details about this AI chip are clear.
The Ignite conference, which appeals to a wide audience including developers, IT experts and managers, will be held in Seattle between November 14-17. At this conference, Microsoft has already announced that it will feature a number of major product announcements focusing on its artificial intelligence platform, especially during the keynote that will feature CEO Satya Nadella and other major company executives.
Currently, Microsoft is using NVIDIA’s H100 GPUs to power data centers that manage AI services such as the Bing Chat AI chatbot, Bing Image Creator image renderer, and most recently, the Copilot assistant service.
Microsoft and other prolific AI companies purchased a large number of NVIDIA GPUs for these data servers last year, causing the company’s revenues and share prices to skyrocket in 2023. However, the new news states that if Microsoft produces its own artificial intelligence processors, it will not have to use NVIDIA’s chips so much. Even a partial loss of business for a major customer like Microsoft could cause a significant decline in NVIDIA’s revenues.
In a report published in April, The Information claimed that Microsoft was developing this new in-house artificial intelligence chip under the code name Athena. He added that the chip had been developed since 2019 and that approximately 300 team members were working on the project at that time.
Another unconfirmed report from Bloomberg in May claimed that Microsoft had formed a partnership with NVIDIA’s main rival in the GPU space, AMD, to help them co-develop the Athena chip. It was also claimed that Microsoft provided financial support to AMD to create its own artificial intelligence chip.
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