Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips

Microsoft buys a lot of GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD. But moving forward, Redmond's leaders want to shift the majority of its AI workloads from GPUs to its own homegrown accelerators.

The software titan is rather late to the custom silicon party. While Amazon and Google have been building custom CPUs and AI accelerators for years, Microsoft only revealed its Maia AI accelerators in late 2023.

Driving the transition is a focus on performance per dollar, which for a hyperscale cloud provider is arguably the only metric that really matters. Speaking during a fireside chat moderated by CNBC on Wednesday, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said that up to this point, Nvidia has offered the best price-performance, but he's willing to entertain anything in order to meet demand.

Going forward, Scott suggested Microsoft hopes to use its homegrown chips for the majority of its datacenter workloads.

When asked ...