Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips

Summary

Microsoft Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Artificial Intelligence Kevin Scott speaks at the Microsoft Briefing event at the Seattle Convention Center Summit Building in Seattle, Washington, on May 21, 2024. Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty ImagesMicrosoft would like to mainly use its own chips in its data centers in the future, the tech giant's chief technology officer said on Wednesday, in a move which could reduce its reliance on major players like Nvidia and AMD.Semiconductors and the servers that sit inside data centers have underpinned the development of artificial intelligence models and applications.Tech giant Nvidia has dominated the space so far with its graphics processing unit (GPUs), while rival AMD has a smaller slice of the pie.But major cloud computing players, including Microsoft, have also designed their own custom chips for specifically for data centers.Kevin Scott, chief technology officer at Microsoft, laid out the company's strategy around chips for AI during a fireside chat at Italian Tech Week that was moderated by CNBC.Microsoft primarily uses chips from Nvidia and AMD in its own data centers. The focus has been on picking the right silicon — another shorthand term for semiconductor — that offers "the best price performance" per chip."We're not religious about what the chips are. And ... that has meant the best price performance solution has been Nvidia for years and years now," Scott said. "We will literally entertain anything in order to ensure that we've got enough capacity to meet this demand."At the same time, Microsoft has been using some of its own chips.In 2023, Microsoft launched the Azure Maia AI Accelerator which is designed for AI workloads, as well as the Cobalt CPU. In addition, the firm is reportedly working on its next-generation of semiconductor products. Last week, the U.S. technology giant unveiled new cooling technology using "microfluids" to solve the issue of overheating chips.When asked if the longer...