AMD jumps 9% on report Microsoft is collaborating on AI chip push

AMD shares rose to a session high on Thursday following a media report claiming the chipmaker was working with Microsoft on a new artificial intelligence processor.

Microsoft’s main competitors in the cloud infrastructure market, Amazon And Alphabet, both have their own specialized chips that software developers can use to train models. But to date, Microsoft has not released a special-purpose AI chip. The one being developed in partnership with AMD is codenamed Athena, and it will be able to train models and make inferences on new data, Bloomberg reported.

Microsoft is helping AMD fund the initiative, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources.

Nvidia shares fell after the report. Like other big tech companies, Microsoft relies on Nvidia graphics processing units to run AI models.

Both AMD and Microsoft declined to comment on the report.

The need for silicon capable of handling AI has become more critical than ever in the past six months, especially at Microsoft, which provides the computing resources for the viral chatbot ChatGPT from the OpenAI startup. The technology required thousands of Nvidia GPUs, Microsoft said.

But Microsoft also needs chips to run its own applications that rely on the large GPT-4 language model at the heart of ChatGPT. Large language models belong to a class of generative AI technologies that can create content such as text in response to human input. Microsoft’s Bing chatbot incorporates the GPT-4 model, and the software maker has announced security and productivity programs that will also use it.

AMD is already a chip supplier for Microsoft, as well as other cloud providers, such as Google and Oracle.

Read Bloomberg’s full report here.

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