Microsoft technology chief says supply of Nvidia’s AI chips is improving
Nilay Patel, left, editor in chief of The Verge, and Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, speak at Vox Media’s Code Conference at The Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel in Dana Point, California, on Sept. 27, 2023.
Jerod Harris | Vox Media | Getty Images
Microsoft technology chief Kevin Scott said on Wednesday that the company is having an easier time getting access to Nvidia‘s chips that run artificial intelligence workloads than it was a few months ago.
Speaking on stage at the Code Conference in Dana Point, California, Scott said the market for Nvidia’s graphics processing units is opening up a little. The GPUs have been heavily in demand since Microsoft-backed OpenAI launched the ChatGPT chatbot late last year.
“Demand was far exceeding the supply of GPU capacity that the whole ecosystem could produce,” Scott told The Verge’s Nilay Patel. “That is resolving. It’s still tight, but it’s getting better every week, and we’ve got more good news ahead of us than bad on that front, which is great.”
Microsoft, similar to Google and other tech companies, has been quickly adding generative AI to its own products and selling the technology’s capabilities to clients. Training and deploying the underlying AI models has mainly relied on Nvidia’s GPUs, creating scarcity of supply.
Nvidia said last month that it expects revenue growth this quarter of 170% from a year earlier. The company has such control of the AI chip market that its gross margin shot up from 44% to 70% in a year. Nvidia’s stock price is up 190% in 2023, far outpacing every other member of the S&P 500.
In an interview with Patel that was published in May, Scott said one of his responsibilities is controlling the GPU budget across Microsoft. He called it “a terrible job” that has been “miserable for five years now.”
“It’s easier now than when we talked last time,” Scott said Wednesday. At that time, generative AI technologies were still new and attracting broad attention from the public, he said.
The increased supply “makes my job of adjudicating these very gnarly conflicts less terrible,” he said.
Nvidia expects to increase supply each quarter through next year, finance chief Colette Kress told analysts on last month’s earnings call.
Traffic to ChatGPT has declined month over month for three consecutive months, Similarweb said in a blog post. Microsoft provides Azure cloud-computing services to OpenAI. Meanwhile, Microsoft is planning to start selling access to its Microsoft 365 Copilot to large organizations with subscriptions to its productivity software in November.
Scott declined to address the accuracy of media reports regarding Microsoft’s development of a custom AI chip, but he did highlight the company’s in-house silicon work. Microsoft has previously worked with Qualcomm on an Arm-based chip for Surface PCs.
“I’m not confirming anything, but I will say that we’ve got a pretty substantial silicon investment that we’ve had for years,” Scott said. “And the thing that we will do is we’ll make sure that we’re making the best choices for how we build these systems, using whatever options we have available. And the best option that’s been available during the last handful of years has been Nvidia.”
WATCH: Amazon’s A.I. investment is a page out of the OpenAI-Microsoft playbook: Deepwater’s Doug Clinton
Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Anthropic on Monday announced Claude for Life Sciences, a new offering for researchers to use the company’s artificial intelligence technology in the advancement of scientific discovery.
Claude for Life Sciences is built around Anthropic’s existing AI models, but supports new connections with other scientific tools that are commonly used in labs during research and development.
It will be able to help researchers through all stages of the discovery process, from carrying out literature reviews to developing hypotheses, analyzing data, drafting regulatory submissions and more, Anthropic said.
The launch of Claude for Life Sciences marks Anthropic’s first formal entry into the sector, and comes just months after the company hired longtime industry executive Eric Kauderer-Abrams as its head of biology and life sciences.
“Now is the threshold moment for us where we’ve decided this is a big investment area,” Kauderer-Abrams told CNBC in an interview. “We want a meaningful percentage of all of the life science work in the world to run on Claude, in the same way that that happens today with coding.”
Anthropic, which is one of the companies at the center of the AI boom, develops a family of large language models called Claude. It was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI executives and researchers, and its valuation has swelled to $183 billion in just four years.
The company launched a new model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, late last month and said it is “significantly better” at life sciences tasks like understanding laboratory protocols.
Kauderer-Abrams said researchers have already been engaging with Anthropic’s models to help with isolated parts of the scientific process, so the company decided to formally build out Claude for Life Sciences as a way to support them from start to finish.
That meant Anthropic had to establish integrations with key players in the life sciences ecosystem, including Benchling, PubMed, 10x Genomics and Synapse.org, among others. Anthropic has also partnered with companies that can help life sciences organizations adopt AI, like Caylent, KPMG, Deloitte, and cloud providers AWS and Google Cloud, the company said.
“We’re willing and enthusiastic about doing that grind to make sure that all the pieces come together,” Kauderer-Abrams said.
In a prerecorded demo, Anthropic showed how a scientist working on preclinical studies could use Claude for Life Sciences to compare two study designs that test different dosing strategies.
The scientist was able to query her lab’s data directly from Benchling, generate a summary and tables of key differences with links back to the original material. After reviewing the results, the scientist generated a study report that could be included in a regulatory submission.
Anthropic said an analysis like this used to require “days” of validating and compiling information, but now, it can be done in minutes.
Kauderer-Abrams said the company believes AI can bring about real efficiency gains for the life sciences sector, but it’s also under “no illusions” that it will magically overcome the physical limitations of conducting scientific research. Clinical trials that take three years are not suddenly going to take one month, he said.
Instead, Anthropic is focused on exploring the time-consuming, expensive parts of the discovery process “piece by piece” to determine where AI could be most useful.
“We’re here to make sure that this transformation happens and that it’s done responsibly,” Kauderer-Abrams said.
WATCH: Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.5, its latest AI model
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