Microsoft has unveiled the Cobalt 200, a custom server processor intended for its Azure cloud infrastructure. The company says the new design delivers about a 50 percent performance increase over the prior Cobalt 100 and improves energy efficiency. Built on Arm Neoverse V3 technology in a dual-chiplet layout, the processor totals 132 cores and is manufactured on TSMC’s 3 nm node. The chip includes 192 MB of L3 cache and 12 memory channels, and the design emphasizes fine-grained power control so each core can operate at an independent voltage and frequency to boost performance according to workload demand.
The Cobalt 200 integrates specialized accelerators for compression and cryptographic workloads, which Microsoft estimates account for roughly 33 percent of typical cloud operations. By offloading those tasks to dedicated hardware, the company says general-purpose cores are freed for other work. The processor ships with hardware memory encryption enabled by default and supports Arm confidential compute features to strengthen workload isolation for enterprise customers.
Microsoft described an extensive validation and design process that modeled more than 140 real-world Azure scenarios and used Artificial Intelligence-driven simulations to evaluate over 350,000 configuration options before finalizing the architecture. Some Cobalt 200 systems are already running in Microsoft datacenters, with broader customer availability expected in 2026. Early production results are promising: one collaboration service reported a 45 percent performance improvement and a 35 percent reduction in compute requirements compared with the previous platform. Microsoft positions the Cobalt 200 as a foundational hardware component for many Azure services going forward.
