Microsoft’s stealth work on AI chips

Statue of the goddess Athena, Vienna, Austria. © iStock.

According to The Information, Microsoft has been working since 2019 on designing chips specifically for AI under the code name Athena. One motivation is to reduce its reliance on Nvidia, which gets costly given that Microsoft will need tens of thousands of GPUs to run its new OpenAI-based services in Bing, Office, GitHub, Azure and others. Each of these specialized GPUs goes for several tens of thousands of US dollars. The Information also reports that Microsoft and OpenAI staff have already tested early 5 nm in-house samples, etched by TSMC, with the latest large language models such as GPT-4. But Microsoft isn’t the first to design its proprietary AI chip. Google, Amazon and Meta have also invested in their own silicium.

⇨ The Verge, Tom Warren, “Microsoft reportedly working on its own AI chips that may rival Nvidia’s.”

2023-04-25