Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday tweeted a video of his firm’s first deployed large AI system — or AI “manufacturing unit” as Nvidia likes to name them. He promised that is the “first of many” such Nvidia AI factories that might be deployed throughout Microsoft Azure’s world information facilities to run OpenAI workloads.
Every system is a cluster of greater than 4,600 Nvidia GB300 rack computer systems sporting the much-in-demand Blackwell Extremely GPU chip and related by way of Nvidia’s super-fast networking tech known as InfiniBand. (Apart from AI chips, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang additionally had the foresight to nook the market on InfiniBand when his firm acquired Mellanox for $6.9 billion in 2019.)
Microsoft guarantees that it is going to be deploying “a whole bunch of 1000’s of Blackwell Extremely GPUs” because it rolls out these methods globally. Whereas the scale of those methods is eye-popping (and the corporate shared loads extra technical particulars for {hardware} lovers to peruse), the timing of this announcement can also be noteworthy.
It comes simply after OpenAI, its companion and well-documented frenemy, inked two high-profile information middle offers with Nvidia and AMD. In 2025, OpenAI has racked up, by some estimates, $1 trillion in commitments to construct its personal information facilities. And CEO Sam Altman mentioned this week that extra had been coming.
Microsoft clearly desires the world to know that it already has the information facilities — greater than 300 in 34 nations — and that they’re “uniquely positioned” to “meet the calls for of frontier AI at present,” the corporate mentioned. These monster AI methods are additionally able to working the following technology of fashions with “a whole bunch of trillions of parameters,” it mentioned.
We anticipate to listen to extra about how Microsoft is ramping as much as serve AI workloads later this month. Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott might be talking at iinfoai Disrupt, which might be held October 27 to October 29 in San Francisco.
