Microsoft previews new virtual machine series for generative AI

AI is top of the agenda for Microsoft seems to be the message coming from executives in Redmond. On Monday, Microsoft announced the preview of new ND H100 v5 VMs, an on-demand offering in sizes that range from eight up to thousands of NVIDIA H100 GPUs connected by NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking. With the preview, Microsoft plans to speed up AI models to support generative AI scenarios.

The announcement comes just days after Microsoft launched a preview of ChatGPT in OpenAI Service. Microsoft has invested heavily in Azure Machine Learning, models like Turing, and multi-exabyte scale models that it uses to support Bing, Edge, and Dynamics 365.  

“With our experience of delivering multiple-ExaOP supercomputers to Azure customers around the world, customers can trust that they can achieve true supercomputer performance with our infrastructure. For Microsoft and organizations like Inflection, NVIDIA, and OpenAI that have committed to large-scale deployments, this offering will enable a new class of large-scale AI models…[this preview offering] will become a standard offering in the Azure portfolio, allowing anyone to unlock the potential of AI at Scale in the cloud,” wrote Matt Vegas, principal product manager for Azure HPC and AI.