Microsoft has revealed Cobalt 200, the next version of its Arm-based CPU designed specifically for Azure. The chip builds on the foundation set by Cobalt 100 and maintains full compatibility with existing environments. Microsoft says the design was based on analysis of actual Azure customer workloads rather than synthetic benchmark tests. The chip targets services involving analytics, web hosting, storage intensive tasks and high throughput networking.
Cobalt 200 uses a 132-core architecture and is built on a 3nm process. Each core supports Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling, allowing individual tuning of performance and power draw. This approach is meant to reduce wasted energy in sessions where workloads shift frequently. The chip is part of Microsoft’s broader effort to improve efficiency across its data centres as operational power costs continue to rise.
A set of dedicated accelerators handle compression, encryption and data decompression. Microsoft says internal research showed that more than thirty percent of customer workloads rely on these operations. By offloading them, Cobalt 200 can free CPU resources for other tasks and reduce compute costs. The design also includes a custom memory controller that encrypts memory by default without introducing notable overhead, and implements Arm’s Confidential Compute Architecture to isolate virtual machine memory from the hypervisor and host.
Cobalt 200 is integrated into a platform that includes Azure’s Hardware Security Module for key protection and Key Vault for scalable cryptographic key management. Azure Boost provides additional offload for network and remote storage activity to lower latency and increase throughput. These features are intended to support compliance needs while improving performance across multi-tier cloud architectures.
Microsoft positions Cobalt 200 as a core part of its global Azure infrastructure. Early hardware is already active in selected data centres, with broader availability scheduled for 2026. The chip is expected to appeal to organisations looking to control energy consumption while scaling distributed compute systems, GPU-assisted workloads and services that depend on high efficiency CPU performance.
Independent comparisons between Cobalt 200 and competing cloud CPUs will become more meaningful once the chip reaches wider customer access. For now, Microsoft is presenting it as a practical response to real world workload patterns and a necessary step in managing the increasing power demands facing modern data centres.
