Rani Borkar and Saurabh Dighe report on Microsoft’s work driving open-source standards for AI infrastructure, covering power, cooling, security, sustainability, and large-scale operations in partnership with the Open Compute Project community.

Microsoft Advances Open-Source Infrastructure for Frontier-Scale AI

Microsoft is driving the next generation of cloud and AI infrastructure by contributing open standards and innovative solutions across critical areas such as power, cooling, security, networking, and operational resiliency. These efforts, showcased at the OCP (Open Compute Project) Global Summit, aim to enable the reliable delivery and rapid scaling of AI workloads globally.

Power Innovations and Stabilization for AI Datacenters

  • Microsoft is developing new standards in power distribution, including solid-state transformers to streamline datacenter power conversion and support future rack voltage requirements.
  • Recent collaborations (with partners like Meta, Google, OpenAI, and NVIDIA) aim to address the volatile power needs of large-scale AI training clusters. Full-stack innovations integrate hardware and firmware orchestration, predictive telemetry, and facility-level engineering to smooth power spikes, reduce overshoot, and enhance stability.
  • A new power stabilization workgroup is being established within OCP to foster open collaboration for resilient, scalable power delivery.
  • Details on the power stabilization initiative.

Cooling and Sustainability Breakthroughs

  • Modular, HXU-based liquid cooling enables high-performance AI systems to be rapidly deployed even within existing air-cooled datacenters, doubling cooling capacity without major modifications.
  • Microsoft is advancing facility water cooling, closed-loop liquid systems, and microfluidic on-chip cooling for improved efficiency and support of high-density compute workloads.
  • The company contributes to OCP’s Sustainability workgroup, supporting standardization of carbon measurement methodologies and promoting waste heat reuse in data centers worldwide.
  • Heat reuse reference designs and more.

Resilient Networking for AI at Scale

  • Microsoft is developing unified networking solutions—including scale-up, scale-out, and WAN strategies—to efficiently link large numbers of GPUs for distributed AI training.
  • Strong engagement with Ethernet standards bodies is enabling interoperable fabrics and next-generation AI system deployments.
  • More on networking advances.

Security, Trust, and Hardware Root-of-Trust

  • Microsoft is reinforcing ‘defense in depth’ by enhancing silicon- and hardware-level security (notably Caliptra 2.1), enabling quantum-resilient cryptography, and advancing open-source key management.
  • The OCP Layered Open-source Cryptographic Key Management (L.O.C.K) standard secures media encryption keys for storage devices in hardware.
  • Details on Caliptra 2.1 security subsystem.

Sustainability and Carbon Reporting

  • As part of OCP’s Sustainability workgroup, Microsoft is driving efforts to standardize carbon measurement, reporting, and waste heat reuse, collaborating with AWS, Meta, and others.
  • Open methodologies for life cycle assessment (LCA) are helping define a ‘gold standard’ for sustainable cloud infrastructure.
  • Embodied Carbon Disclosure Specification.

Fleet Operational Resiliency

  • Open standards for lifecycle management ensure scalable, unified management of compute nodes across hyperscale datacenters.
  • Joint development with major chip and cloud providers focuses on unified firmware, management interfaces, diagnostics, and RAS improvements.
  • More on resilient fleet operations.

Connect with Microsoft at the OCP Global Summit

  • Visit Microsoft at OCP Summit booth #B53 for the latest demos.
  • Explore sessions and virtual tours to see these innovations in practice: Virtual Datacenter Tour.
  • Read the full blog post for complete details: Microsoft Azure Blog.

This post appeared first on “The Azure Blog”. Read the entire article here