- According to media reports, Microsoft is working with AMD to develop an artificial intelligence chip codenamed Athena.
- AMD has received financial backing from Microsoft, the report said.
Lisa Su, CEO, AMD
Scott Mullin | CNBC
AMD shares hit a new high on Thursday after media reports claimed the chipmaker was working with Microsoft on a new artificial intelligence processor.
Microsoft’s biggest competitors in the cloud infrastructure market, Amazon and Alphabet, both have their own specialized chips that software developers can use to train models. But to date, Microsoft has not released a dedicated AI chip. The one under development in partnership with AMD, codenamed Athena, can train models and make inferences on new data, reports Bloomberg.
Microsoft is helping AMD fund the initiative, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources.
Nvidia’s stock fell after the report. Like other big tech companies, Microsoft relies on his Nvidia graphics processing units to run its AI models.
AMD and Microsoft declined to comment for this report.
The need for AI-capable silicon has never been more critical in the last six months. Microsoft in particular provides computing resources for OpenAI’s viral ChatGPT chatbot. According to Microsoft, the technology required thousands of his Nvidia GPUs.
But Microsoft also needs chips to run its own applications that take advantage of the GPT-4 large-scale language model at the heart of ChatGPT. Large-scale language models belong to a class of generative AI technologies that can create content such as text in response to human input. Microsoft’s Bing chatbot incorporates his GPT-4 model, and the software maker has also announced security and productivity programs that use it.
AMD already supplies chips to Microsoft as well as other cloud providers such as Google and Oracle.
Read the full Bloomberg report here.
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