SAN FRANCISCO, May 16 (Reuters) - Microsoft ( MSFT )

said on Thursday it plans to offer its cloud computing customers

a platform of AMD artificial intelligence chips that

will compete with components made by Nvidia ( NVDA ), with

details to be given at its Build developer conference next week.

It will also launch a preview of new Cobalt 100 custom

processors at the conference.

Microsoft's ( MSFT ) clusters of Advanced Micro Devices' ( AMD ) flagship

MI300X AI chips will be sold through its Azure cloud computing

service. They will give its customers an alternative to Nvidia's ( NVDA )

H100 family of powerful graphics processing units

(GPUs) which dominate the data center chip market for AI but can

be hard to obtain due to high demand.

To build AI models or run applications, companies typically

must string together - or cluster - multiple GPUs because the

data and computation will not fit on a single processor.

AMD, which expects $4 billion in AI chip revenue this

year, has said the chips are powerful enough to train and run

large AI models.

As well as Nvidia's ( NVDA ) top-shelf AI chips, Microsoft's ( MSFT ) cloud

computing unit sells access to its own in-house AI chips called

Maia.

Separately, the Cobalt 100 processors Microsoft ( MSFT ) plans to

preview next week offer 40% better performance over other

processors based on Arm Holdings' technology, the

company said. Snowflake and others have begun to use

them.

The Cobalt chips, which were announced in November, are

being tested to power Teams, Microsoft's ( MSFT ) messaging tool for

businesses, and positioned to compete with the in-house Graviton

CPUs made by Amazon.com ( AMZN ).