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| Microsoft Partners with Lumen Technologies to Boost AI Services Network Capacity Image credit: Microsoft Newsroom |
Microsoft has partnered with Lumen Technologies, formerly known as CenturyLink, to enhance its network capacity to support its expanding AI services business. Announced on Wednesday, the collaboration will utilize Lumen's Private Connectivity Fabric to increase both bandwidth and overall capacity between Microsoft's AI datacenters. This will be achieved through a combination of existing and new fiber lines.
The partnership aims to support Microsoft's extensive integration of OpenAI's generative neural networks across platforms such as GitHub, Office 365, and Windows. These AI applications necessitate the processing and transfer of large volumes of data, placing significant demands on datacenter interconnect networks.
Modern large language models, like those developed by OpenAI in Microsoft's datacenters, are trained on vast amounts of data, often ranging from tens to hundreds of terabytes. Training these models requires substantial compute clusters with tens of thousands of GPUs working in unison.
As Microsoft continues to expand its AI infrastructure to accommodate new clients and model builders, enhancing inter-datacenter capacity is crucial. The exact increase in capacity from this partnership remains unclear, as it may vary based on whether Microsoft aims to scale its GPU clusters across multiple sites or simply improve inter-datacenter communications.
As part of the agreement, Lumen will migrate some of its workloads to Microsoft Azure, integrating Microsoft's AI technology into its products and using Microsoft's Entra identity management and access control platform. Lumen anticipates that this migration will save it over $20 million in the next year and improve its customer service experience, potentially through the use of Microsoft's OpenAI-based chatbots.
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