As it tries to grow its cloud operations quickly enough to keep ahead of Google, Meta, and other rivals, Microsoft is leading the AI arms race. Its abundance of GPUs allows it to achieve that, and its CTO is in a prime position to oversee the infrastructure scale-out. It is therefore his responsibility to determine what hardware Microsoft should utilize going forward, which makes his industry knowledge quite insightful. He recently shared his opinions on the state of the AI market, saying that while Nvidia remains the market leader in hardware, AMD’s aspirations should also not be undervalued.
At the recent Code conference, which was organized by Vox Media, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott shared his thoughts about the company’s future as well as the current standing of Nvidia and AMD in the AI market. He backed down when challenged about the company’s purported plans to create an accelerator for AI applications, saying only that it’s choosing wisely among the options available. According to CNBC, he said, “And the best option that’s been available during the last handful of years has been Nvidia.”
These remarks are not surprising given Microsoft’s close relationship with OpenAI, which powers ChatGPT with Nvidia GPUs. With its latest Copilot technology, the company has integrated ChatGPT directly into Windows 11, and it has also brought some of its functions to the Edge browser and Bing search.
Scott also said a few nice things about AMD, a longtime partner of Microsoft. It uses AMD’s proprietary silicon for its Azure cloud platform and Epyc CPUs for its Xbox game consoles. According to CNBC, Scott stated, “They’re making increasingly compelling GPU offerings that I think are going to become more and more important to the marketplace in the coming years.” His remarks sent AMD’s stock plunging nearly 5%.
Additionally, Scott stated that the availability of Nvidia GPUs is starting to improve. This is significant news because the industry has been struggling for the previous nine months or so to obtain these GPUs on a large scale. Scott claims that although his work as Microsoft’s GPU budget manager has been extremely unpleasant for the previous five years, it is currently becoming “less terrible.” It’s unclear if this has affected the quantity of Nvidia GPUs that are available for purchase, but the CNBC report also notes that ChatGPT traffic has decreased consecutively over the last three months.