Microsoft developing its own AI chip code-named Athena

Microsoft is working on its own artificial intelligence (AI) chip code-named ‘Athena’ that can be used to train large language models (LLMs) in order to reduce its reliance on chipmaker Nvidia, according to a report from The Information published on Tuesday. 

Microsoft has been working on the project since 2019 and as per the news report, the chip “will utilise the TSMC 5nm process, to begin with, but does plan to create several more generations of chips in the future. This will allow the company to save overhead from purchasing chips from 
Nvidia, which is the key supplier of AI server chips at present. According to a report by The Verge, the company's “latest H100 GPUs are selling for more than $40,000 on eBay, illustrating the demand for high-end chips that can help deploy AI software”.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has invested billions into OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, to build products using AI and LLMs. The news also comes a few months after the company integrated OpenAI into its Bing Search Engine and in the Microsoft Edge web browser. Athena will be used to educate LLMs, and any data acquired during and after training these models, the report said. 

The chips, according to sources that reported to the news website are currently being used among a small subset of employees at Microsoft and OpenAI. Microsoft could potentially make the chips more widely available "as early as next year", it said.

Microsoft isn't the first to make its own chips, of course. Google and Amazon are already among the tech majors that have invested in in-house silicon. Google’s AI chip called the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is designed for machine learning tasks and is used with Google’s TensorFlow software, the company’s open-source software library for machine learning. In November last year, Amazon’s cloud-computing unit Amazon Web Services (AWS) also announced its new chips designed to power the high-end computing tasks, supporting tasks such as weather forecasting and gene sequencing.

That said, Microsoft still uses Nvidia products for Nvidia DGX and Nvidia Omniverse cloud, which utilise the company's Azure data centres and offer support for Microsoft's online Office 365 platform. In fact, the company is not expecting the chip to be a "replacement for Nvidia's products", as per the report from The Information, which further hinted that Athena is considered a "touchy subject" within the company.