Microsoft and AMD are reportedly teaming up to combat Nvidia’s AI dominance

Enlarge / AMD’s Instinct AI accelerators aren’t as widely used as competing products from Nvidia. (credit: AMD)

The hardware that has enabled and driven the recent explosion of generative AI products has primarily been manufactured by Nvidia. That’s thanks in part to its dominant position in the consumer and workstation graphics markets, plus the well-established CUDA libraries and its AI-accelerating Tensor cores.

Although Microsoft uses “tens of thousands” of Nvidia GPUs in its Azure data centers, Bloomberg reports that the company is also working with AMD to improve the AI capabilities of its GPUs. Although extremely light on details, the report says Microsoft is contributing “support” and “engineering resources” to AMD to improve its products’ performance in AI workloads.

Bloomberg also says that AMD is working on a Microsoft-developed AI accelerator named “Athena,” which The Information reported details on last month. A Microsoft spokesperson, however, flatly denied that AMD was involved in Athena’s development.