Microsoft is reportedly teaming up with AMD to jointly develop artificial intelligence processors. The partnership is part of Microsoft’s strategy to secure the supply of AI processor chips and explore alternatives to Nvidia’s GPU chips that currently dominate the market. The two companies are collaborating on developing an AI processor code-named “Athena,” which Microsoft is self-developing, and AMD is providing financial support.
Microsoft is working on a Chip Division with 1000 Employees
Microsoft is one of the major cloud computing service providers, and the company has invested $10 billion in OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. This investment has led to increased demand for AI processors, and Microsoft’s participation in the chip industry is gradually deepening. Microsoft is building a chip division with nearly 1,000 employees, and they are working on Project Athena, which has received around $2 billion in investments from Microsoft.
Artificial intelligence is also a top priority for AMD. Lisa Su, AMD CEO, said, “We are very excited about our opportunity in artificial intelligence, which is also our highest strategic priority. We are in the very early days of the era of artificial intelligence computing.” Su also said that there is an opportunity for AMD to produce custom chips for its largest customer for use in AI data centers.
Although developing an alternative to Nvidia chips is a challenging task, Microsoft is prioritizing Project Athena, which involves developing a GPU chip for training and inference of AI models. The chip is already being tested internally and could be widely available as soon as next year.
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(Via)
