Microsoft unveils Azure Cobalt 200 CPU, in-house chip targets higher performance and deeper integration — Arm-based chip is equipped with 132 cores and manufactured using TSMC’s 3nm process

Microsoft has revealed its next major in-house server processor, the Azure Cobalt 200, a 132-core Arm-based CPU built on TSMC’s 3nm process and designed to raise the performance ceiling across Azure’s general-purpose compute tiers.

Like the Cobalt 100 before it, the new processor is built around an Arm Neoverse platform. This generation, however, moves to Arm’s latest CSS V3 subsystem and combines two 66-core chiplets for a total of 132 cores. Microsoft describes the chip as its most efficient data center CPU to date. Internal telemetry shows more than 50% higher performance than the Cobalt 100 across a blended set of real-world workloads.