Nvidia and Microsoft team up to build massive AI cloud computer

On Wednesday, Nvidia announced a collaboration with Microsoft to construct a “huge” cloud pc centered on AI. It’ll reportedly use tens of 1000’s of high-end Nvidia GPUs for purposes like deep studying and large language models. The businesses intention to make it some of the highly effective AI supercomputers on this planet.

In flip, the brand new supercomputer will function 1000’s of models of what’s arguably the most powerful GPU on this planet, the Hopper H100, which Nvidia launched in October. Nvidia can even present its second strongest GPU, the A100, and make the most of its Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking platform, which may switch information at 400 gigabits per second between servers, linking them collectively into a strong cluster.

In the meantime, Microsoft will contribute its Azure cloud infrastructure and ND- and NC-series digital machines. Nvidia’s AI Enterprise platform will tie the entire thing collectively. The businesses can even collaborate on DeepSpeed, Microsoft’s deep studying optimization software program.

In an announcement, Nvidia talked about the purposes the joint supercomputer would possibly serve:

“As a part of the collaboration, Nvidia will make the most of Azure’s scalable digital machine situations to analysis and additional speed up advances in generative AI, a quickly rising space of AI wherein foundational fashions like Megatron Turing NLG 530B are the idea for unsupervised, self-learning algorithms to create new textual content, code, digital photos, video or audio.”

This previous 12 months has seen a fast rise in generative AI fashions similar to Stable Diffusion and DALL-E that may synthesize novel photos on demand. Comparable fashions have appeared that may create video, synthesize voices, and perform transcription, amongst different makes use of. As computational demand will increase for generative AI, Nvidia and Microsoft intend to be there to satisfy it.

As soon as Nvidia and Microsoft’s cloud pc comes on-line, clients can deploy 1000’s of GPUs in a single cluster to “prepare even probably the most huge giant language fashions, construct probably the most complicated recommender methods at scale, and allow generative AI at scale,” based on Nvidia.

The businesses didn’t present particulars on when the brand new supercomputer will likely be prepared however talked about that the announcement marks the start of a “multi-year collaboration.” It is doubtless the cloud pc will scale up in capability over time.