Supercomputers/Systems/Microsoft Azure AI supercomputer for OpenAI (2020)
USA · operational · ai training
Microsoft Azure AI supercomputer for OpenAI (2020)
Operated by Microsoft at Microsoft Azure (undisclosed US region) .
Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- -
- Rpeak
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- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
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- Cores
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- Power
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- Per watt
- - GF/W
Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.
What this machine is made of
One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.
| Role | Part | Supplier at build | Quantity | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - single system with more than 285,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs | Microsoft | - | Reported | news.microsoft.comengadget.com |
| Accelerator | NVIDIA Tesla V100 Accelerators CUDA (Volta GV100) · 5,120C · 1.53 GHz · 12 nm · 300 W Nvidia V100 GPUs | NVIDIA | - | Reported | theregister.com |
AI datacenter metrics
Figures beyond an accelerator count, each with who stated it. What can and cannot be compared across AI datacenters.
| Metric | Value | As of | Basis | Note | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accelerators | 10,000 accelerators | 2020-05 | Operator stated | Microsoft: single system with 10,000 GPUs and more than 285,000 CPU cores; the release does not name the GPU model | news.microsoft.com |
The read
The single Azure system Microsoft built for OpenAI, announced at Build in May 2020 with more than 285,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs and 400 Gb/s of network connectivity per GPU server, and a claim to rank in the TOP500's top five. Microsoft named no GPU model and gave no benchmark result, and told The Register it could say only that the machine would rank in the top five, so no rank, FLOPS or pointer is recorded. The V100 GPU attribution comes from The Register's industry sources and not from Microsoft, so that edge is reported and carries no count. No source says where it is hosted or whether it has since been retired or absorbed into later systems.
Timeline
- 2020-05 Announced source
Site & facility
Change history
- 2026-10-04 AI datacenter metrics: Microsoft Azure AI supercomputer for OpenAI (2020)
- 2026-09-20 Added Microsoft's 2020 Azure supercomputer for OpenAI
Source check
We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| news.microsoft.com | names system only | - |
| theregister.com | names system only | - |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.