Since the creation of the printing press in approximately 1450, the amount of information created and disseminated hasn’t stopped growing. However, reasoned Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in his Ignite 2016 keynote address, the addition of the internet was a key inflection point and has ultimately made us data rich, and time and attention poor. “We've used technology very successfully to democratise both creation of information and the distribution and access of information. And now we need to turn to technology to democratise creation and access to intelligence,” said Nadella.

Microsoft’s strategy to cut through the noise includes four core pillars – agents, applications, services, and infrastructure. And it’s the infrastructure layer where the birth of the world’s first AI supercomputer has taken place. Over the past two years, Microsoft has been quietly deploying a global hyperscale architecture of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). These programmable hardware boards, which can have their functionality changed on the fly, are currently found in Microsoft’s datacentres in 15 countries in five continents, and add speed, scale and efficiency to operations.