Unlocking AI’s Full Potential: Open-Source Infrastructure at Scale

Key points

• Microsoft is leading the development of open-source infrastructure for frontier-scale AI, with a focus on optimizing power, cooling, and networking for AI workloads.
• The company is collaborating with industry partners to advance standards for global interoperability and standardization, including the development of solid-state transformers and power stabilization initiatives.
• Sustainability and security are major areas of focus, with Microsoft contributing to initiatives such as carbon reporting, accounting, and circularity, as well as advancing the adoption of waste heat reuse and developing open methodologies for Life Cycle Assessment.

Microsoft is at the forefront of the next phase of cloud infrastructure innovation, with a focus on developing open-source infrastructure for frontier-scale AI. The company has added over 2 gigawatts of new capacity and launched the world’s most powerful AI datacenter, which delivers 10x the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputer. However, this is just the beginning, as Microsoft is embarking on an ambitious new journey to redefine infrastructure innovation at every layer of execution, from silicon to systems.

A key area of focus is power distribution, as AI workloads scale globally and hyperscale datacenters experience unprecedented power density and distribution challenges. Microsoft is contributing new standards across power, cooling, sustainability, security, networking, and fleet resiliency to further advance innovation in the industry. The company is also leading a power stabilization initiative to address the challenge of variable and intense power draw patterns that can strain the grid and create challenges across capacity planning and sustainability goals.

In addition to power distribution, Microsoft is also rearchitecting its cooling infrastructure to support evolving needs around energy consumption, space optimization, and overall datacenter sustainability. The company is utilizing Heat Exchanger Unit (HXU)-based liquid cooling to rapidly deploy new AI capacity within its existing air-cooled datacenter footprint. Microsoft’s next-generation HXU is an upcoming OCP contribution that enables liquid cooling for high-performance AI systems in air-cooled datacenters, supporting global scalability and rapid deployment.

Unified networking solutions are also a major area of focus, as Microsoft explores networking optimizations that can support the growing demands of AI workloads. The company is developing solutions leveraging scale-up, scale-out, and Wide Area Network (WAN) solutions to enable large-scale distributed training. Microsoft is also driving forward adoption of Ethernet for scale-up networking across the ecosystem and is excited to see the Ethernet for Scale-up Networking (ESUN) workstream launch under the OCP Networking Project.

Microsoft’s comprehensive approach to scaling AI systems responsibly includes embedding trust and security into every layer of its platform. The company is introducing new security contributions that build on its existing body of work in hardware security and introduce new protocols that are uniquely fit to support new scientific breakthroughs that have been accelerated with the introduction of AI. Microsoft is also contributing to initiatives such as carbon reporting, accounting, and circularity, as well as advancing the adoption of waste heat reuse and developing open methodologies for Life Cycle Assessment.

As Microsoft enters a new era of frontier-scale AI development, the company takes pride in leading the advancement of standards that will drive the future of globally deployable AI supercomputing. With its commitment to open-source infrastructure development, collaboration with industry partners, and focus on sustainability and security, Microsoft is paving the way for frontier-scale AI computing. The company invites attendees of the OCP Global Summit to connect with Microsoft and discover its latest cloud hardware demonstrations, which showcase its ongoing collaborations with partners throughout the OCP community.

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