“Every data center will need some part of AI capabilities to run workloads like inference, because it’s just becoming such a fundamental part of all of this cloud technology,” says Alistair Speirs, general manager of Microsoft’s Azure Infrastructure. Speirs joins Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Technology Analyst Anurag Rana on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss how AI infrastructure is reshaping the modern data center, from liquid cooling and dense networking to custom silicon and distributed supercomputing. Speirs explains how Azure is preparing for a world where training, inference and traditional workloads increasingly converge, making software-defined infrastructure, power availability and global scale central to Microsoft’s cloud strategy.

Microsoft on Azure’s AI Data Center Stack

Tech Disruptors

Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast. My name is Anurag Rana. I'm a technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, part of Bloomberg's research department with 500 analysts and strategists working across all major world markets. We're excited to have Alistair Spears as our guest today. Alistair is a general manager of Azure Infrastructure and has been with Microsoft for almost 19 years.

Alistair drives global strategy across cloud fundamentals like data center, AI infrastructure, security, while pushing the frontier of computing through the work in silicon, supercomputing, quantum, and advanced science as part of Microsoft's commercial cloud and AI team. Alistair, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me.

So on today's podcast, we'll do a deep dive into Microsoft's Azure infrastructure, specifically how an AI data center is fundamentally different than a traditional data center. We will focus on various layers of the stack, including custom chips, networking, cooling, and security. Alistair, to start, can you please explain your current role at Microsoft? Yeah, thanks, Anurag. So I lead our global platform team here in the Azure business group.

So we're a small but mighty team that works across our product engineering teams, our sales and marketing teams, and our ecosystem partners. And really our core focus is on the long-term health and growth of our cloud and AI business. So right now that means working with our data center teams and where demand is going and how we can line up supply signals.

It's our close partnerships with NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel, as long as our internal silicon work on chips like Azure Maya, Azure Cobalt, and even our quantum systems with Maya Rana as well. The idea is to build these systems that scale and perform at their best as well.

Microsoft on Azure’s AI Data Center Stack

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

Microsoft on Azure’s AI Data Center Stack

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.