Microsoft (MSFT-0.55%) chief executive Satya Nadella announced the first cloud private preview of Nvidia's Blackwell AI infrastructure on its cloud computing platform, Azure, during the company's developers' conference on Tuesday. The Azure ND GB200 V6 VM series is based on the Nvidia Blackwell platform.
"Blackwell is pretty amazing. It's got this 72 GPUs on a single NVLink domain, and then you combine it with InfiniBand on the backend," Nadella said during his keynote at Microsoft Ignite. "These racks are optimized for the most cutting-edge training workloads and inference workloads."
New servers from Microsoft will also be equipped with its new in-house security chip, Azure Integrated HSM, or hardware security module, that uses encryption and signing keys for protection.
Meanwhile, Nvidia's customers reportedly have been worried about delays for the Blackwell AI platform. The chipmaker repeatedly has asked its suppliers to change the design of its custom-designed server racks in recent months because its Blackwell AI chips are overheating when connected, The Information reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. The server racks combine 72 of the AI chips in hopes that larger AI models can be trained faster with more GPUs, or graphics processing units.
The redesigns are being made later than usual in the production process, The Information reported, but Nvidia could still ship the server racks on schedule, which it set at the end of the first half of next year. Nvidia previously faced production and shipping delays for Blackwell due to a design flaw, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said in October, after media reports surfaced in August.
"It was functional, but the design flaw caused the yield to be low," Huang said. "It was 100% Nvidia's fault."
Microsoft also introduced new purpose-built AI agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, including an interpreter agent that allows for real-time interpretation in up to nine languages in Microsoft Teams meetings, which will launch in preview early next year. It also rolled out a project manager agent, now in preview, that can automatically create plans and oversee projects.
In addition, the tech giant launched the autonomous AI agent capabilities that it announced in October. Customers can build their own autonomous agents in Copilot Studio that can "understand the nature of your work and act on your behalf," Microsoft said.