Microsoft invests $1.5 billion in UAE-based AI company G42

Microsoft Corporation announced Today, the company announced a $1.5 billion investment in G42, an artificial intelligence development company based in the United Arab Emirates.

The cloud computing and software giant will receive a minority stake in G42 as part of the deal. In addition, his Brad Smith, vice chairman and president of Microsoft, will join his G42 board of directors.

financial times newspaper report The investment “required negotiations” with the Biden administration. As part of the agreement, G42 agreed to remove Huawei hardware from its artificial intelligence infrastructure, according to reports.Separately, Bloomberg report Today, the G42 reached an agreement with the US Department of Commerce last year to reduce its presence in China.

G42, officially Group 42 Holding Ltd, was founded in Abu Dhabi about six years ago. Last August, the company open sourced Jais, his 13 billion parameter large-scale language model that can process Arabic and English text. This model is based on the Transformer neural network architecture that underpins state-of-the-art LLMs.

Following a $1.5 billion investment announced today, G42 will use Microsoft's Azure cloud platform to support its AI development efforts. The company plans to migrate its “data platform and other critical technology infrastructure” to Azure. G42 also uses its cloud platform to provide AI software to its customers. Last year, G42 partnered with Microsoft to make the Jais language model available on Azure.

The partnership between the two companies extends to many other areas as well. Microsoft and G42 will jointly establish a $1 billion developer fund to foster AI skills in the UAE and other countries. Additionally, in the future, the two companies plan to collaborate on data center infrastructure initiatives in emerging markets.

“By bringing expanded, low-latency data center infrastructure to emerging markets, Microsoft and G42 will help accelerate digital transformation across key industries in these regions,” said Judson Althoff, Chief Commercial Officer, Microsoft. says: blog post today. “This will expand access to services and technology for countries in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, enabling them to address their toughest business concerns while ensuring the highest standards of security and privacy. Become.”

The deal strengthens Microsoft's already significant presence in the AI ​​startup ecosystem. The company is a major supporter of his OpenAI and has provided over $10 billion worth of cloud infrastructure and capital to ChatGPT-4 developers over the past few years.Recently, Microsoft hired Most of the staff at LLM developer Inflection AI Inc., one of OpenAI's best-funded rivals,

The tech giant's AI investment strategy focuses not only on LLM startups but also on the Azure platform.Last November, Microsoft announced plans to deploy an in-house designed machine learning accelerator called Maia 100 to its cloud data centers. As part of the same effort, the company is rolling out a custom liquid cooling system to dissipate heat generated by the new AI chip.

photograph: microsoft