Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: "We Are Turning Azure Into The First AI Supercomputer"

Short Bytes: Apart from being a golden hen, Microsoft’s Azure Cloud platform is company’s one of the most research-intensive sections. To make it more powerful, Microsoft aims to develop it as the first AI supercomputer. These thoughts were expressed by CEO Satya Nadella at an event in Dublin.

After striving hard to become a mobile-first company, tech giants are investing in the next big thing in the world of computing, i.e., artificial intelligence. Slowly and gradually, the services we are using in our daily lives are being improved with a shade of artificial intelligence. Microsoft, one of the world’s largest software makers, doesn’t intend to miss this opportunity.

At an event in Dublin, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella told that Microsoft’s Azure cloud is being turned into the first AI supercomputer. Microsoft’s widely popular cloud platform is already being used to power a wide range of applications and it has emerged as Microsoft’s money-making machine. The company has even embraced many Linux-based technologies to attract more users to Azure.

At the event, Nadella said that cloud is all about powering the next-gen applications. He said that machine learning and artificial intelligence are the technologies that define the cloud applications, ZDNet reported. “Therefore we are building out Azure as the first AI supercomputer.”

This will involve powering the cloud not just using traditional CPU architectures but GPUs as well. We know that GPUs are scalable and they can handle large workloads.

Nadella stressed the same and said that GPUs are much better at performing with deep neural net algorithms.

Apart from Azure’s AI-focussed architecture, Microsoft is also offering higher level services that help one build AI applications and services. Developers can use Microsoft’s speech, object recognition, natural language processing, and image APIs.

At the event, Microsoft President Brad Smith said that cloud computing has the potential to change the world and we must work together to build a cloud for global good. More on Microsoft’s ‘A Cloud for Global Google’ initiative can be found here.

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