Monday, October 9th 2023
Microsoft to Unveil Custom AI Chips to Fight NVIDIA's Monopoly
According to sources close to The Information, Microsoft is supposed to unveil details about its upcoming custom silicon design for accelerating AI workloads. Allegedly, the incoming chip announcement is scheduled for November during Microsoft's annual Ignite conference. Held in Seattle from November 14 to 17, the conference is supposed to show all of the work that the company has been doing in the field of AI. The alleged launch of an AI chip will undoubtedly take center stage in the announcement, as the demand for AI accelerators has been so great that companies can't get their hands on GPUs. The sector is mainly dominated by NVIDIA, with its H100 and A100 GPUs powering most of the AI infrastructure worldwide.
With the launch of a custom AI chip codenamed Athena, Microsoft hopes to match or beat the performance of NVIDIA's offerings and reduce the cost of AI infrastructure. As the price of H100 GPU can get up to 30,000 US Dollars, building a data center filled with H100s can cost hundreds of millions. The cost could be winded down using homemade chips, and Microsoft could be less dependent on NVIDIA to provide the backbone of AI servers needed in the coming years. Nevertheless, we are excited to see what the company has prepared, and we will report on the Microsoft Ignite announcement in November.
Source:
The Information
With the launch of a custom AI chip codenamed Athena, Microsoft hopes to match or beat the performance of NVIDIA's offerings and reduce the cost of AI infrastructure. As the price of H100 GPU can get up to 30,000 US Dollars, building a data center filled with H100s can cost hundreds of millions. The cost could be winded down using homemade chips, and Microsoft could be less dependent on NVIDIA to provide the backbone of AI servers needed in the coming years. Nevertheless, we are excited to see what the company has prepared, and we will report on the Microsoft Ignite announcement in November.
33 Comments on Microsoft to Unveil Custom AI Chips to Fight NVIDIA's Monopoly
One can only hope that GPU's become obsolete for for Ai much like what happened to them when Bitcoin ASICS came to market and GPU Bitcoin farming died.
wow
See this happening everywhere for everything since and post covid. The place I work for has general contractors doing work for us charging out their labourers for $200/hr, and I would bet their labours don't even see 20% of that. That pricing is starting a change for a lot of companies to start hiring and doing things internally.
If prices are exuberantly high it's only a matter of time before companies and people start to do more on their own.
Besides, Microsoft is much richer than Nvidia and could afford to buy it outright if they wanted to even though that is rather unlikely. Microsoft's net income is about 4 times higher than Nvidia's and revenue is also about 4 times greater. Microsoft is no AMD; it's vastly richer than any of the hardware companies bar Apple.
there’s money to be made <insert tech space>
Builds least capable version possible and it fails. Iterate minimally. Keep costs down.
Lobby government claiming the monopolistic habits of competitors causes failure.
Literally use your monopoly to force people to use your stuff.
Microsoft is much closer to hedge fund than tech company. They do the tech stuff because they have to. They’d much, much rather just acquire and exploit than innovate.
Seriously though, where or what for do all these up to 150,000 wafers monthly go?
In the end, his wariness will lead companies away from his overpriced general process units and force him back to gaming yet again. It's happened before and it'll happen again. He's always on the cusp of greatness and then has to "just" settle for a few billion by the end.
I wish he'd set his sights on AI, spin off the gaming GPU business, and leave it to its fate. Then the AI bubble could burst and he could watch the gaming industry continue to accelerate away from him, his greed having finally beaten him into submission after his long hard fought battle against reality.
In regards to spinning off, I think it's too late now. Compute consumers have been gouged for years leading up to this. H100 is 30% improved over A100 yet the price went from $10K to $40K, smh. The market will not forget this.
Apple must be banned from using the state-of-the-art process nodes. 28nm and 22nm would be ideal for the iphone users...