Stefan Mileschin

According to sources close to The Information, Microsoft is developing a new custom networking card that could lessen the grip of NVIDIA's networking division, formed by the acquisition of Mellanox, on Microsoft server equipment. The card is reportedly intended to resemble NVIDIA's ConnectX-7 model, which supports 400 Gb Ethernet at maximum bandwidth. However, given that the chip is not out yet and availability is still far off, the final design could aim at higher Ethernet bandwidth (800 GbE, for example). Leading the network card project is Pradeep Sindhu, who previously co-founded Juniper Networks. Microsoft acquired Sindhu's latest startup, Fungible, last year, bringing him on board to head up this effort. By creating its own high-speed networking hardware tailored for AI workloads, Microsoft aims to accelerate and lower the cost of model training for AI ambitions, as well as reduce reliance on NVIDIA as the primary supplier of high-performance networking cards.

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