… To make those investments in AI infrastructure, the AI model builders have themselves had to raise tremendous amounts of money from investors – sometimes including their AI compute engine suppliers, which is a bit of roundtripping, indeed. …
… The upshot is that if AWS wants to cover its Trainium and Graviton and Nitro costs, it is going to have to sell systems to the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI, with which it has a deal for 2 gigawatts of Trainium gear, ramping in 2027 and representing maybe $60 billion to $70 billion in datacenter co… …
… I am not advocating for that any more than I would for Microsoft to give away free Maia AI XPUs. It is against all of that context that we turn to Microsoft’s most recent financial results and see how it is doing in its AI business journey, particularly on the Azure cloud. …
… Net income was $38.46 billion, aided by a $7.6 billion gain from its 27 percent stake in OpenAI. In Q1 F2026, OpenAI’s books put a $3.1 billion loss on Microsoft’s books. The remaining $2.4 billion in Other income came from interest and other stuff. …
… The “Grace-Hopper” superchip pairing of the CG100 CPU and the H100 GPU accelerator was very much aimed at recommendation engines. …
… And hence it divulged the “Athena” Maia 100 XPU in November 2023 with very few details and some rack photos. The Maia 100 chip was designed to support both AI training and inference, and was explicitly designed to run OpenAI’s GPT as a backend for Microsoft’s OpenAI API services and its copilots. …