Microsoft is developing a $100 billion supercomputer for OpenAi
Microsoft is developing a $100 billion data center containing an advanced artificial intelligence supercomputer. The project is designed to power OpenAi's new technologies. All the details
Microsoft and OpenAI, the company best known for ChatGPT, are working on developing a data center and supercomputer for artificial intelligence, called Stargate: the project could cost up to $100 billion and come online in 2028. Microsoft is OpenAI's largest investor.
The spread of the so-called "generative artificial intelligence" – so called because it is capable of generating texts, images and videos – is increasing the demand for specialized data centers, capable of guaranteeing a processing capacity much higher than that of traditional data centers .
MICROSOFT AND OPENAI'S PLAN FOR SUPERCOMPUTERS
According to revelations from the specialized portal The Information , Microsoft will probably be responsible for financing the project, which will be one hundred times more expensive than most of the data centers currently in existence. The Stargate supercomputer will also be the largest of those that Satya Nadella's company plans to build in the next six years, Reuters reports: it will be installed in the United States, but it is not yet clear where.
In 2026, two years before Stargate, Microsoft should activate another supercomputer for OpenAI, but a less powerful one. In 2025 OpenAI is expected to release its new artificial intelligence system.
A PROJECT IN FIVE PHASES
Microsoft's supercomputer project is divided into five phases: Stargate belongs to phase five, the final one, while the device for 2026 is phase four. The company is currently in phase three.
It seems that a considerable portion of the expenses for the development of the next two phases will be linked to the acquisition of microchips for artificial intelligence, which are very high-performance but also very expensive: NVIDIA, the most important company in this market, said last month that its new Blackwell B200 chips will be priced at $30,000-$40,000 each.
THE EXPENSE FOR MICROCHIPS
The Intercept wrote that the Stargate supercomputer will contain “millions of specialized server chips to power OpenAI's artificial intelligence.” To keep costs down, Microsoft is developing its own microchips. Last November the company announced two devices for its data centers: one, the Azure Maia Accelerator, is designed specifically for artificial intelligence systems; while the other, the Azure Cobalt CPU, for more general applications.
Additionally, the new data center will be designed to use microchips from different vendors. This is linked to last February's announcement on the reliance on Intel semiconductor technologies , in addition to the devices purchased from NVIDIA.
Estimates say spending on the data center project will exceed $115 billion, more than triple Microsoft's 2023 spending on servers, buildings and equipment.
– Read also: Not just OpenAI, here's why Microsoft is also focusing on its French rival Mistral
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/microsoft-openai-supercomputer-centro-dati-100-miliardi/ on Tue, 02 Apr 2024 08:42:56 +0000.