Microsoft designs their own Arm CPU & AI accelator/GPU while OpenAI pauses ChatGPT Plus signups

Microsoft's gone and designed its own CPU and AI chip for Azure. The Cobalt CPU is a "128-core chip that's built on an Arm Neoverse CSS design" that'll be used to power "general cloud service" on Azure, which right now are being tested with Teams and SQL servers. Azure customers will be able to run VMs on the Cobalt CPUs "next year". This is pretty similar to Amazon's Graviton Arm-based CPUs. The Maia AI accelerator was made in collaboration with OpenAI and is a similar chip to AMD's MI300X or Nvidia's H100, albeit probably not as powerful as either of those. It looks like the main reason Microsoft bothered to do this is so they actually have access to this type of hardware, as it's so hard to compete with everyone else over a limited supply of chips. SemiAnalysis has way more info, but it's paywalled so I couldn't read it all. Maybe this increase in compute capacity will allow OpenAI to resume new subscriptions for ChatGPT Plus, as they've "paused" signups today after "surge in post devday" activity "exceeded our capacity".