As AI continues to revolutionize industries, Microsoft is expanding its global cloud infrastructure to cater to the needs of developers and customers worldwide. At Microsoft Build 2024, we are showcasing our latest advancements in creating tools and services specifically designed to support your AI solutions. Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure stands out for its ability to offer choice and flexibility in performance and power to meet the unique AI requirements of customers, whether it involves accelerating deployment speeds or reducing operating costs. We have enhanced our platform to provide the performance and resilience necessary for building intelligent AI applications, ensuring exceptional cost-performance in compute and advanced generative AI capabilities for our customers.
Powerful compute capabilities for general-purpose and AI workloads are at the core of Microsoft’s expertise, allowing us to run AI supercomputers that power some of the world’s largest AI services like Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, ChatGPT, Bing, and more. Our focus on expanding our AI infrastructure revolves around optimizing performance, scalability, and power efficiency by taking a systems approach to cloud infrastructure that optimizes both hardware and software to efficiently handle workloads at scale.
In November 2023, we introduced Azure Cobalt 100, our first in-house designed cloud compute processor, designed to enable general-purpose workloads on the Microsoft Cloud. We are pleased to announce the preview of Azure virtual machines built to run on Cobalt 100 processors, offering Azure’s most power-efficient compute option with up to 40% better performance than previous Arm-based VMs. This enhanced performance and efficiency extend to customers such as Elastic, MongoDB, Siemens, Snowflake, and Teradata. The introduction of Cobalt 100-based VMs is expected to improve efficiency and performance for both Azure customers and Microsoft products.
In addition to our custom Azure Cobalt 100 and Maia series and silicon industry partnerships, Microsoft is now the first cloud provider to bring AMD’s most powerful Instinct MI300X Accelerator, the ND MI300X VM series, to Azure. Azure’s infrastructure supports various AI supercomputing scenarios, from building large models from scratch to fine-tuning models for specific domains, delivering unprecedented cost-performance for inferencing scenarios like GPT-4.
Azure Migrate and Modernize offer curated resources and expert assistance to facilitate the migration or modernization of on-premises infrastructure. By combining thousands of virtual machines with tens of thousands of GPUs and leveraging the best networking topologies, Microsoft’s AI infrastructure provides a complete compute platform for AI workloads, driving cost-efficiency per workload.
The introduction of the Azure Compute Fleet service simplifies the provisioning of Azure compute capacity across different VM types, availability zones, and pricing models, enabling users to control VM group behaviors automatically and programmatically. This service optimizes operational efficiency, enhances core compute flexibility, and improves reliability for both AI and general-purpose workloads at scale.
As businesses expand their computing estate, managing and governing the entire infrastructure can become overwhelming. Microsoft addresses this challenge through AI-enhanced central management and security, offering an intelligent control plane that spans from cloud to edge for consistent management across environments. Microsoft Copilot in Azure acts as an AI companion, assisting teams in managing operations seamlessly across cloud and edge environments.
Microsoft is continuously enhancing Copilot with new features and improvements to help developers be more productive. With new skills available for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in Copilot for Azure, developers can simplify common management tasks and optimize database administration through AI-enhanced management. Security enhancements, such as integrating Microsoft Defender for Cloud capabilities, streamline risk exploration, remediation, and code fixes.
Our commitment to providing a cloud infrastructure built for limitless innovation empowers developers to stay ahead in this new era by offering the power, flexibility, and performance needed to achieve their AI ambitions. Microsoft’s unique approach to cloud and AI infrastructure enables developers to meet the challenges of the rapidly evolving technological landscape while continuing to innovate efficiently at scale. Join us at Microsoft Build to discover new ways to transform with AI.
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