Microsoft is set to capitalize on its work on integrating field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) into servers for machine learning workloads, by launching a specialized Azure cloud service. Project Brainwave will be offered in preview, with a limited set of capabilities and allocations, and will only be available in the East US 2 region to begin with. The company also plans to offer Brainwave servers as on-premises edge deployments. "I think this is a first step in making the FPGAs more of a general-purpose platform for customers," Mark Russinovich, chief technical officer for Azure, said at Microsoft Build conference. Brainwave uses Intel's Stratix 10 FPGAs, and builds upon Microsoft's previous work with these chips.