Microsoft has designed two additional infrastructure chips for its data centres that will help speed artificial intelligence operations and increase data security, it said at its Ignite conference.
Microsoft has devoted significant resources to develop home-grown silicon for general purpose applications and artificial intelligence.
Like rivals Amazon.com and Google, Microsoft's engineers say there is a performance and price benefit to designing chips that are customized for its needs.
Microsoft's two new chips are designed to be installed deep within the company's data centre infrastructure. One chip is designed to increase security and the other is for data processing.
The company makes the effort to design an array of data centre processors because it aims to "optimize every layer of infrastructure" and ensures that Microsoft's data centres crunch information at the speed AI requires, said Rani Borkar, corporate vice president, Azure hardware systems and infrastructure
Engineers will install the new security chip called the Azure Integrated HSM in every new server destined for a data centre beginning next year.