It will also launch a preview of new Cobalt 100 custom
processors at the conference.
Microsoft's clusters of Advanced Micro Devices' flagship
MI300X AI chips will be sold through its Azure cloud computing service. They
will give its customers an alternative to Nvidia's H100 family of powerful
graphics processing units (GPUs) which dominate the data center chip market for
AI but can be hard to obtain due to high demand.
To build AI models or run applications, companies typically
must string together - or cluster - multiple GPUs because the data and
computation will not fit on a single processor.
AMD, which expects $4 billion in AI chip revenue this year,
has said the chips are powerful enough to train and run large AI models.
As well as Nvidia's top-shelf AI chips, Microsoft's cloud
computing unit sells access to its own in-house AI chips called Maia.
Separately, the Cobalt 100 processors Microsoft plans to
preview next week offer 40% better performance over other processors based on
Arm Holdings' technology, the company said. Snowflake and others have begun to
use them.
The Cobalt chips, which were announced in November, are
being tested to power Teams, Microsoft's messaging tool for businesses, and
positioned to compete with the in-house Graviton CPUs made by Amazon.com.