NVIDIA teams with Microsoft to build powerful AI supercomputers

NVIDIA has just announced a multi-year collaboration with Microsoft to build “one of the most powerful AI supercomputers.” The proposed AI supercomputer will benefit from Microsoft Azure’s advanced supercomputing infrastructure and NVIDIA GPUs, networking and full stack of AI software. NVIDIA is confident that it will help enterprises train, deploy and scale AI, including large, state-of-the-art models.

The collaboration will see NVIDIA utilizing Azure’s scalable virtual machine instances for research purposes and further accelerate advances in generative AI. NVIDIA and Microsoft will jointly work on optimizing Microsoft’s DeepSpeed deep learning optimization software.

“AI technology advances as well as industry adoption are accelerating. The breakthrough of foundation models has triggered a tidal wave of research, fostered new startups and enabled new enterprise applications,” said Manuvir Das, vice president of enterprise computing at NVIDIA. “Our collaboration with Microsoft will provide researchers and companies with state-of-the-art AI infrastructure and software to capitalize on the transformative power of AI.”

“AI is fueling the next wave of automation across enterprises and industrial computing, enabling organizations to do more with less as they navigate economic uncertainties,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Cloud + AI Group at Microsoft. “Our collaboration with NVIDIA unlocks the world’s most scalable supercomputer platform, which delivers state-of-the-art AI capabilities for every enterprise on Microsoft Azure.”

NVIDIA’s full AI suite and software development kits, Which are optimized for Azure, will be made available to Azure enterprise customers. However, no timeline is given for when enterprises can use Azure Cloud-based AI supercomputer jointly developed by NVIDIA and Microsoft.