Microsoft’s new H200 v5 series VMs for Azure aim to supercharge GPU performance

New VM series drastically improves performance and cost efficiency for LLM inferencing

News By Ross Kelly published 7 October 2024

Microsoft has announced the launch of new Azure virtual machines (VMs) aimed specifically at ramping up cloud-based AI supercomputing capabilities.

The new H200 v5 series VMs are now generally available for Azure customers and will enable enterprises to contend with increasingly cumbersome AI workload demands.

Harnessing the new VM series, users can supercharge foundation model training and inferencing capabilities, the tech giant revealed.

Scale, efficiency and performance

In a blog post, Microsoft said the new VM series is already being put to use by a raft of customers and partners to drive AI capabilities.

“The scale, efficiency, and enhanced performance of our ND H200 v5 VMs are already driving adoption from customers and Microsoft AI services, such as Azure Machine Learning and Azure OpenAI Service,” the company said.

Among these is OpenAI, according to Trevor Cai, OpenAI’s head of infrastructure, which is harnessing the new VM series to drive research and development and fine-tune ChatGPT for users.

“We’re excited to adopt Azure’s new H200 VMs,” he said. “We’ve seen that H200 offers improved performance with minimal porting effort, we are looking forward to using these VMs to accelerate our research, improve the ChatGPT experience, and further our mission.”

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