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Microsoft cranks up its AI infrastructure offerings with new VMs, cooling and power delivery tech
- Microsoft has unveiled a raft of new infrastructure advances and upgrades, seeking to provide the foundation for the next generation of artificial intelligence for everyone from start-ups to multinationals. The new infrastructure upgrades are geared to offer customers more options in power, performance and cost efficiency. Among the new developments is Nvidia's most eagerly awaited graphic processing unit: the Blackwell GPUs.
- The blackwell GPUs have started co-validation ahead of the launch of the Azure ND GB200 v6 virtual machine series, which will combine Nvidia GB200 NVL 72 with Quantum InfiniBand networking infrastructure. Microsoft is also introducing a number of customised security chips for enhanced key management and encryption in its data centres.
- Microsoft is also offering new silicon options, including new versions of the Azure Maia AI accelerators and the Azure Cobalt central processing units. Another option is Azure Boost DPU, Microsoft's first data processing unit designed to support data-centric workloads with high performance and low energy consumption.
- The company is also launching Azure HBv5, a new VM series that will be powered by AMD's new EPYC 9V64H processors designed for high performance computing workloads, offering seven terabytes per second of high bandwidth memory.
- Microsoft has developed a new “sidekick rack” heat exchanger unit for its existing data centres to help keep AI accelerator chips cool, and also developed a “disaggregated power rack” in collaboration with Meta Platforms, which delivers 400 volts of DC power to support up to 35% more AI accelerators per server rack. It also enables dynamic power adjustments for different kinds of AI workloads.
- Microsoft is expanding the availability of its Oracle Database@Azure service to a total of nine regions globally, and has introduced Azure Local, a cloud connected infrastructure offering designed to bring together the capabilities of the Azure Stack into a single, unified platform.
- The company also announced Windows Server 2025 is getting new features, including simplified upgrades, enhanced security and support for AI and machine learning. SQL Server 2025 is available in preview, with an enhanced database offering leveraging Azure Arch for cloud agility in any location, and supporting AI workloads with integrated AI application development tools.
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