Microsoft Pairs Azure Cloud Platform, Graphcore AI Chips - ETCentric

Microsoft will begin providing customers of its Azure cloud platform with chips made by U.K. startup Graphcore, with the goal of speeding up the computations for artificial intelligence projects. Graphcore, founded in Bristol in 2016, has attracted several hundred million dollars in investment and the attention of many AI researchers. Microsoft invested in Graphcore last December, with the hope of making its cloud services more compelling. Graphcore's chips have not previously been available publicly. Wired reports that "unlike most chips used for AI, Graphcore's processors were designed from scratch to support the calculations that help machines to recognize faces, understand speech, parse language, drive cars, and train robots."