Selim Bilgin and Pat Stemen present the technical foundations and innovations behind Azure Cobalt 200, detailing its cloud-native capabilities, hardware acceleration, security features, and impact on Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure.

Announcing Azure Cobalt 200: Next-Generation Arm-Based CPU for Cloud Workloads

By Selim Bilgin, Corporate Vice President, Silicon Engineering, and Pat Stemen, Vice President, Azure Cobalt

Microsoft has announced Azure Cobalt 200, the next evolution of its custom Arm-based CPU for cloud-native workloads. Cobalt 200 is engineered to deliver up to 50% performance gains over its predecessor, Cobalt 100, and integrates advanced security, networking, and storage features for robust data center solutions.

Key Innovations in Cobalt 200

  • Full Compatibility: Supports workloads previously running on Cobalt 100, enabling seamless migration and upgrade.
  • Performance: 132 active Arm Neoverse V3 cores, each with 3MB of L2 cache and a total of 192MB L3 system cache, boosting compute for complex cloud workloads.
  • Energy Efficiency: Utilizes individual core-level Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) and is built on TSMC’s 3nm process to optimize power consumption.

Benchmarking for Real Workloads

  • Microsoft used telemetry from diverse Azure workloads—including databases, web servers, storage, network transactions, and analytics—to tune Cobalt 200 beyond traditional hardware benchmarks.
  • Over 140 benchmarks evaluated across 2,800 system design parameters and 350,000 system configurations ensured optimal performance for real-world scenarios.

Advanced Security Architecture

  • Memory Encryption: On by default, enabled by a custom memory controller, ensuring data protection with minimal impact to performance.
  • Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA): Provides hardware-based isolation of VM memory from hypervisors and host operating systems.
  • Custom Accelerators: Dedicated hardware for compression, cryptography, and encryption tasks offloads CPU cycles, benefiting workloads like Azure SQL.
  • Integrated HSM: Built-in Azure Integrated Hardware Security Module works with Azure Key Vault for cryptographic key management, supporting FIPS 140-3 Level 3 compliance.

Enhanced Infrastructure Capabilities

  • Azure Boost: Increases network bandwidth and efficiently offloads storage/networking tasks to specialized hardware, reducing workload latency and maximizing throughput.
  • Scalability: Deployment across new datacenter regions, supporting both Microsoft cloud services and customer workloads.

Real-World Impact

  • Early adopters (Databricks, Snowflake, Microsoft Teams) experience significantly improved performance, energy efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.
  • Teams media processing reduced core usage by 35%, while attaining up to 45% better performance compared to previous platforms.
  • Security and compliance features are now more deeply integrated into cloud hardware.

Availability and Outlook

  • Production Cobalt 200 servers are operating in select Microsoft datacenters, with wider customer access targeted for 2026.
  • Microsoft is preparing for global rollout, anticipating new customer solutions and service advancements.

Learn More

For infrastructure architects and cloud engineers, Cobalt 200 represents Microsoft’s commitment to optimizing cloud compute from silicon to software, delivering performance, energy efficiency, and strong security features to meet real-world workload demands.

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