Cobalt 200: Azure's next cloud-native CPU Hub (techcommunity.microsoft.com)

Microsoft announced Azure Cobalt 200, its next-generation Arm-based cloud CPU built for real-world cloud-native workloads — first servers are already live in datacenters with broader customer availability planned for 2026. Cobalt 200 targets up to 50% better performance than Cobalt 100 while maintaining strong power efficiency, continuing Microsoft’s co-design approach that pairs silicon with Azure software. The announcement follows fast uptake of Cobalt 100 by customers such as Databricks, Snowflake, and Microsoft Teams (Teams reported up to 45% performance gains and 35% fewer cores for media processing), signaling strong demand for specialized cloud silicon. Technically, Cobalt 200 is an Arm Neoverse CSS V3-based SoC with 132 active cores, 3 MB L2 per core and 192 MB L3, fabricated on TSMC’s 3nm process. It adds per-core DVFS, an always‑on memory encryption controller, Arm Confidential Compute Architecture support, and custom on‑SoC compression and cryptography accelerators to offload frequent patterns (compression/encryption) that represent >30% of observed cloud work. Microsoft used an extensive digital‑twin design flow — 140 benchmark variants, 2,800 design combos and ~350,000 candidates modeled with AI/statistical tools — to optimize for network/storage-bound workloads rather than traditional CPU-only benchmarks. For AI/ML teams this means better price‑performance and energy efficiency for large-scale data processing, faster model serving and data pipelines with lower CPU overhead, plus stronger hardware-backed confidentiality and integrated HSM (FIPS 140-3 L3) for secure model/data management.