How Microsoft plans to turn Azure into an 'AI cloud' ZDNet

Microsoft has been using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to improve performance and efficiencies of Bing and Azure for the last few years. But next year, Microsoft plans to make this kind of FPGA processing power available to developers who will be able to use it to run their own tasks, including intensive artificial-intelligence ones, like deep-neural-networking (DNN). At its Build developers conference this Spring, Azure CTO Mark Russinovich outlined Microsoft's big-picture plans for delivering "Hardware Microservices" via the Azure cloud. Russinovich told attendees that once Microsoft solves some lingering security and other issues, "we will have what we consider to be a fully configurable cloud." "This is the core of an AI cloud," Russinovich said, and "a major step toward democratizing AI with the power of FPGA." (A good recap of Russinovich's remarks can be found in this TheNewStack article.)