Microsoft won't stop buying AI chips from Nvidia and AMD even after it launches its own, Nadella says

Microsoft deployed the primary crop of its homegrown AI chips in one among its data centers this week and plans to roll out more in the approaching months. it says.

The chip, called Maia 200, is claimed to be what Microsoft calls an “AI inference powerhouse,” meaning it’s optimized for the computationally intensive work of running AI models in production. The company released some impressive processing speed specs for Maia, saying it outperforms Amazon's latest Trainium chips and Google's latest Tensor Processing Units (TPU).

All the cloud giants are resorting to their very own AI chip designs partly since it's difficult and expensive to get the newest and biggest from Nvidia – a supply shortage that results in this shows no signs of abating.

But even with the corporate having its own cutting-edge, high-performance chip in hand, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the corporate would proceed to purchase chips from others.

“We have a fantastic partnership with Nvidia and AMD. They are modern. We are modern,” he explained. “I feel numerous people just speak about who's ahead. Remember, you’ve gotten to remain ahead without end.”

He added, “Because we are able to integrate vertically, that doesn’t mean we only integrate vertically,” meaning we construct our own systems from the bottom up without using goods from other vendors.

However, Maia 200 is utilized by Microsoft's own so-called superintelligence team, the AI ​​specialists who develop the software giant's own frontier models. This is in line with Mustafa Suleymanthe previous co-founder of Google DeepMind, who now leads the team. Microsoft is working by itself models to perhaps sooner or later reduce its dependence on OpenAI, Anthropic and other model makers.

The Maia 200 chip will even support OpenAI models running on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, the corporate said. But by all accounts, securing access to probably the most advanced AI hardware remains to be a challenge for everybody, paying customers and internal teams alike.

So in a post on XSuleyman is clearly having fun with sharing the news of his team receiving first place. “It’s a giant day,” he wrote when the chip hit the market. “Our superintelligence team will likely be the primary to make use of Maia 200 in developing our groundbreaking AI models.”