IT major Microsoft has built one of the top five supercomputers in the world specifically designed for OpenAI. Hosted on Azure, the supercomputer is designed to train the company’s AI models.

The new supercomputer is powered by 285,000 CPU cores, 10,000 graphics processing units, and 400 gigabits per second of connectivity for each GPU server. According to Microsoft, this is a first step towards making the next generation of very large AI models and the infrastructure needed to train them available as a platform for other organisations and developers to build upon.

Last year, Microsoft and OpenAI announced a collaboration to create new supercomputing technologies in Azure. The platform benefits from all the capabilities of robust modern cloud infrastructure, including rapid deployment, sustainable data centres and access to Azure services.

According to Kevin Scott, Chief Technical Officer, Microsoft, the exciting thing about these models is the breadth of things they’re going to enable. “The potential benefits extend far beyond narrow advances in one type of AI model. This is about being able to do a hundred exciting things in natural language processing at once and a hundred exciting things in computer vision, and when you start to see combinations of these perceptual domains, you’re going to have new applications that are hard to even imagine right now,” he said in the company’s blog post.

Microsoft has built large AI models, the Microsoft Turing models for undertaking specialised language processing jobs for Bing, Office, Dynamics and other productivity products. According to Microsoft, the large AI models, training optimisation tools and supercomputing resources available through Azure AI services and GitHub help data scientists and businesses to utilise the power of AI.

Scott feels that AI becoming a platform is similar to personal computers becoming a platform. “This is about taking a very broad set of data and training a model that learns to do a general set of things and making that model available for millions of developers to go figure out how to do interesting and creative things with,” he said.