Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has announced that his company has become the first cloud provider in the world to install Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 system for validation. This is seen as a significant milestone in the global race to build the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the Vera Rubin NVL72 AI supercomputer at CES, with the company promising up to 5x greater inference performance and 10x lower cost per token than Blackwell – its top-tier AI chip currently available in the market.Nadella shared the news alongside a photo of the system. “We’re the first cloud to bring up an NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 system for validation, another big step in building the next generation of AI infrastructure with NVIDIA,” he said.

Microsoft and Nvidia partner for AI innovation

In October last year, Microsoft and Nvidia announced that they have deepened their partnership to power the next wave of AI industrial innovation. “For years, our companies have helped fuel the AI revolution, bringing the world’s most advanced supercomputing to the cloud, enabling breakthrough frontier models, and making AI more accessible to organizations everywhere. Today, we’re building on that foundation with new advancements that deliver greater performance, capability, and flexibility,” the companies announced.Nvidia added support for Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition on Azure Local, allowing customers to deploy AI and visual computing workloads distributed and edge environments with the easy orchestration and management in the cloud. New NVIDIA Nemotron and NVIDIA Cosmos models in Azure AI Foundry give businesses an enterprise-grade platform to build, deploy, and scale AI applications and agents. “With NVIDIA Run:ai on Azure, enterprises can get more from every GPU to streamline operations and accelerate AI. Finally, Microsoft is redefining AI infrastructure with the world’s first deployment of NVIDIA GB300 NVL72,” the company added.

What is Vera Rubin NVL72

The Vera Rubin is Nvidia’s most ambitious AI data centre architecture to date. Huang described it as the product of what Nvidia calls “extreme co-design”, allowing six different types of chips to work together as one unified system.Those six components are the Vera CPU, the Rubin GPU, the NVLink 6 switch, the ConnectX-9 SuperNIC, the BlueField-4 data processing unit, and the Spectrum-6 Ethernet switch. Together, they form the building blocks of the Vera Rubin NVL72 rack — a single unit of AI computing infrastructure more powerful than anything Nvidia has built before.