Microsoft announced two custom AI chips at its Ignite conference in Seattle on Wednesday, including Maia 100 artificial intelligence chip and Cobalt 100 Arm chip.
The American multinational technology corporation has developed these two chips with the aim for the Maia 100 to compete with Nvidia AI graphics processing units and for the Cobalt 100 to generally work around computing tasks and possibly compete with Intel processors.
Rani Borkar, a corporate vice president, told CNBC in an interview that Virtual-machine instances running on the Cobalt chips will become commercially available through Microsoft’s Azure cloud in 2024, though she did not state the releasing date for the Maia 100.
The announcement regarding the new AI chips from Microsoft suggests that the competition among tech companies is fairly healthy since earlier this week, Nvidia had added new features to its latest flagship chip, the H200, for artificial intelligence (AI), causing Nvidia stock to surge for 10 consecutive days, marking its longest winning streak in seven years.
