Late yesterday Google announced their first custom Arm®-based CPUs branded 'Axiom,' designed for the data center. Axion delivers industry-leading performance and energy efficiency and will be available to Google Cloud customers later this year.

Axion processors combine Google’s silicon expertise with Arm’s highest performing CPU cores to deliver instances with up to 30% better performance than the fastest general-purpose Arm-based instances available in the cloud today, up to 50% better performance and up to 60% better energy-efficiency than comparable current-generation x86-based instances¹. That’s why we’ve already started deploying Google services like BigTable, Spanner, BigQuery, Blobstore, Pub/Sub, Google Earth Engine, and the YouTube Ads platform on current generation Arm-based servers and plan to deploy and scale these services and more on Axion soon. For more, read the full Google press release.

Meta Debuts New AI Chip, Aiming to Decrease Reliance on Nvidia

In other AI news, Meta Platforms Inc. is deploying a new homegrown chip to help power its artificial intelligence services, aiming to decrease its reliance on semiconductors from Nvidia Corp. and other outside companies.

The chip, announced Wednesday, is the latest version of the Meta Training and Inference Accelerator, or MTIA, which helps rank and recommend content across Facebook and Instagram. Meta released the first MTIA product last year.

Meta’s pivot to AI services has brought increased demand for computing power. Last year, the social media giant released its own version of an AI model to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It also added new generative AI features to its social apps, including customized stickers and celebrity-faced chatbot characters.

In October, the company said it would spend as much as $35 billion on infrastructure to support AI, including data centers and hardware. “AI will be our biggest investment area in 2024,” Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg told investors that month. Bloomberg.

Microsoft to invest US$2.9 billion in AI and cloud infrastructure in Japan while boosting the nation’s skills, research and cybersecurity

This morning Microsoft announced that it will invest US$2.9 billion over the next two years to increase its hyperscale cloud computing and AI infrastructure in Japan. It will also expand its digital skilling programs with the goal of providing AI skilling to more than 3 million people over the next three years, open its first Microsoft Research Asia lab in Japan, and deepen its cybersecurity collaboration with the Government of Japan.

This is Microsoft’s single largest investment in its 46-year history in Japan, also the site of its first international office. It effectively doubles the company’s existing financial commitment to expand its AI and cloud infrastructure across Japan.

This significant enhancement in digital capacity will enable Microsoft to provide more advanced computing resources in Japan, including the latest graphics processing units (GPUs), which are crucial for speeding up AI workloads. It builds on Microsoft’s support for the Generative AI Accelerator Challenge (GENIAC), a program led by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry which helps innovative startups and established enterprises develop foundation models as a core technology of generative AI in Japan. 

Microsoft will also invest in training 3 million full-time and part-time workers across Japan over the next three years, giving them the skills they need to build and work with AI technologies. This investment will be delivered through programs focused on assisting organizations and society at large, including women in general and also with a focus on developers and students. 

Microsoft Research is a division of Microsoft that pursues bold ideas and technical breakthroughs in AI, while building on a legacy of foundational computer science advances. As its fundamental research arm in the Asia-Pacific region, Microsoft Research Asia has collaborated with Japanese academia for more than two decades which have been instrumental in propelling cross-disciplinary research and fostering talent.

To foster enhanced research collaboration, Microsoft will provide US$10 million resource grants over the next five years to both The University of Tokyo and to the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence Research between Keio University and Carnegie Mellon University. Microsoft.

While Apple will reveal some of their work on AI features coming to future operating systems, it's unknown whether Apple's Johny Srouji, SVP of Hardware Technologies, will be ready to reveal any news regarding AI chip development.  Apple's WWDC24 keynote is set tor Monday June 10^th.