Microsoft and NVIDIA Announce Major Integrations to Accelerate Enterprise Generative AI

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March 18th, 2024 - SAN JOSE, California - During the GTC event this Monday, Microsoft Corporation and NVIDIA made a long-established partnership reach groundbreaking integrations. The new work leverages state-of-the-art NVIDIA Generative AI and Omniverse? technologies by integrating them within Microsoft's infrastructure, including Azure, Azure AI services, Microsoft Fabric, and Microsoft 365.

Microsoft Chairman and CEO, Satya Nadella, described the value that this joint venture would bring to people and organizations across the globe. He praised the opening of the GB200 Grace Blackwell processor to Azure and the integrations between DGX Cloud and Microsoft Fabric as seamless. Nadella said the advancements would give customers "the most comprehensive platforms and tools across the entire Copilot stack from the underlying hardware to software applications to be able to build the most cutting-edge AI capabilities themselves."

Key Integrations Announced

The partnership between Microsoft and NVIDIA is set to introduce several significant enhancements aimed at accelerating AI capabilities for a wide range of applications:

• Microsoft Azure is set to incorporate the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell Superchip, a move aimed at boosting the capabilities of both customer-facing and internal AI solutions.
• A seamless connection between NVIDIA DGX Cloud and Microsoft Fabric is being established, facilitating the streamlined development of custom AI models utilizing proprietary data.
• For the first time, NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud APIs will be accessible within the Azure Power ecosystem, enhancing tools used for industrial design and simulations.
• The capabilities of Microsoft Copilot are to be expanded by integrating NVIDIA's AI technology and accelerated computing platforms, promising enhanced performance and functionality.
• Microsoft Azure AI will also host new NVIDIA generative AI microservices tailored specifically for enterprise, developer, and healthcare sectors, marking a significant advancement in accessible AI technologies.

Enhancing AI Infrastructure

Microsoft is poised to become one of the pioneering organizations to integrate the advanced capabilities of NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB200 along with NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking in Azure. The objective of integrating it is to provide a smooth operationalization path for such state-of-the-art trillion-parameter foundation models that would enhance diverse AI application areas, including natural language processing, computer vision, speech recognition, and others.

Also, Microsoft announced availability for the Azure NC H100 v5 virtual machine (VM) based on the NVIDIA H100 NVL platform. The VM in question is meant for midrange AI training and inferencing workloads. NC-series VMs allow customers to buy one or two NVIDIA H100 94GB PCIe Tensor Core GPUs in a single flexible offering. These also come inclusive of NVIDIA Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) technology that partitions a GPU into as many as seven separate instances. This feature thus supports any kind of AI-driven tasks; hence, adaptability and scalability are guaranteed.

Transforming Healthcare with Advanced Technologies

Microsoft is deepening its partnership with NVIDIA to revolutionize the healthcare and life sciences sectors, leveraging advancements in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and supercomputing. The integration of Microsoft Azure with NVIDIA DGX? Cloud and NVIDIA Clara? suite of microservices is set to enable rapid innovation in clinical research and care delivery for healthcare providers, pharma and biotech companies, and medical device manufacturers, enhancing efficiency across the board.

Prominent organizations, including Sanofi and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, along with industry software vendors such as Flywheel and SOPHiA GENETICS, academic institutions like the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, and healthcare systems such as Mass General Brigham, are already utilizing these advanced computing and AI capabilities to foster significant improvements in healthcare, aiming to elevate patient care to new heights.

Pioneering Industrial Digitization with Cloud APIs

Microsoft Azure will be the first platform to host NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud APIs, aiming to revolutionize the year by enhancing software applications with better data interoperability, collaborative capabilities, and advanced physics-based visualizations. At the NVIDIA GTC event, Microsoft showcased a glimpse of the potential unlocked by Omniverse Cloud APIs on Azure. Through an interactive 3D viewer integrated with Microsoft Power BI, factory managers can visualize real-time data superimposed on a digital twin of their facility, unlocking insights to accelerate production processes.

Enhancing Microsoft Copilot with NVIDIA's AI Technology

NVIDIA's advanced GPUs and the NVIDIA Triton Inference Server? are key to powering AI inference predictions within Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365. The integration enables Copilot for Microsoft 365, which will soon be accessible via a dedicated key on Windows 11 PCs, to leverage large language models alongside proprietary enterprise data. This fusion provides real-time, context-aware intelligence, boosting user creativity, productivity, and skill levels.

Streamlining AI Deployment with NVIDIA NIM

Azure AI will soon incorporate NVIDIA NIM? inference microservices, significantly boosting the efficiency of AI deployments. As a component of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise suite, available on the Azure Marketplace, NIM offers cloud-native microservices designed for optimal inference performance across a wide array of foundational models, including those developed by NVIDIA and accessible at ai.nvidia.com. These microservices, delivered as pre-built containers that can run anywhere, utilize NVIDIA's AI Enterprise inference software, including the Triton Inference Server, TensorRT?, and TensorRT-LLM. This integration aims to help developers rapidly bring to market AI applications optimized for performance.

The partnership between Microsoft and NVIDIA, as revealed at the NVIDIA GTC event, marks a transformative step for AI and cloud technology. This collaboration is set to redefine the boundaries of what businesses can achieve with advanced AI, from accelerating enterprise AI deployments to pioneering healthcare innovations. For a closer look at the details of this partnership and the technological breakthroughs introduced, the NVIDIA GTC website offers comprehensive insights.

We invite you to share your thoughts and perspectives on this groundbreaking announcement in the comment section below. How do you see these advancements influencing your industry or area of interest? Join the conversation and let us know your views on this exciting development in the world of technology.