Microsoft’s artificial intelligence processor
The Ignite conference for developers, IT professionals and managers will be held in Seattle between November 14-17. Microsoft will make a number of important product announcements, especially during the keynote, which will feature CEO Satya Nadella and other key company executives. Microsoft and the conference are expected to be focused on artificial intelligence platforms in general.
Microsoft is currently using Nvidia’s H100 GPUs to power its productive chatbot Bing Chat, text-to-image generator Bing Image Creator, and artificial intelligence Copilot virtual assistant services. Microsoft and other prolific AI companies purchased tens of thousands of GPUs from Nvidia last year, making Nvidia a $1 trillion company. However, the new report says that if Microsoft produces its own artificial intelligence processors, it will not have to rely so much on Nvidia’s chips. This may cause Nvidia’s revenues to decrease in the future.
Partnership with AMD?
In April, it was reported that Microsoft was developing this new artificial intelligence chip under the code name Athena. At that time, it was also reported that the chip had been developed since 2019 and that approximately 300 team members were working on the project at that time. Another unconfirmed news in May claimed that Microsoft had formed a partnership with Nvidia’s main rival AMD to help them develop the Athena chip together. The news also claims that Microsoft provided financial support to AMD so that it could produce its own artificial intelligence chip.