Azure is becoming the first AI supercomputer, says Microsoft

You may have thought it was just a cloud computing service, but Microsoft's Azure Cloud is on its way to become the first artificial intelligence supercomputer, according to the company's CEO Satya Nadella. At an event in Dublin, Nadella discussed how Microsoft's cloud computing offering underpins a new wave of applications that use AI technologies. "Ultimately the cloud is about powering the next generation of applications," he said. "It is always the next generation applications that have driven infrastructure and when we look at this current generation of applications that people are building, the thing that is going to define these applications, that characterises these applications, is machine learning and artificial intelligence. Therefore we are building out Azure as the first AI supercomputer."