Microsoft has secretly been developing its own artificial intelligence (AI) chips to deal with the rising costs of development for in-house and OpenAI projects, per a report from The Information. 

Reportedly in the works since 2019, Microsoft’s recently revealed hardware venture appears to be designed to reduce the Redmond company’s reliance on Nvidia’s GPUs.

A Google search reveals that the Nvidia H100, one of the more popular GPUs for training machine learning systems, costs as much as $40,000 on reseller service such as eBay amid increasing market scarcity.

These high costs have pushed several big tech companies to develop their hardware, with Meta, Google, and Amazon all developing machine-learning chips over the past few years.

(by Tristan Greene)