In its latest high-profile purchase, Microsoft has announced the acquisition of Fungible to strengthen its Azure cloud platform.

To get its hands on Meta’s high-efficiency, low-power data processing units, Microsoft has acknowledged that it has acquired the business, after news of a prospective transaction in December 2022 and previous speculations of a failed Meta takeover (DPUs).

In a statement published on its website, Fungible explains that it is “glad” to now be a part of Microsoft, which it claims shares its goal, and that it developed its DPUs in 2016 as a reaction to the inefficient execution of data-centric calculations inside server nodes.

The Fungible DPUs have been acquired by Microsoft

An explanation for this may be found in a quote from Azure Core Corporate VP Girish Bablani: “Fungible’s technologies help offer high-performance, scalable, disaggregated, scaled-out datacenter architecture with stability and security.”

According to him, “today’s announcement further signals Microsoft’s commitment to long-term differentiated investments in our datacenter infrastructure,” which improves Microsoft’s wide variety of technologies and offerings such as offloading, lowering latency, expanding server density in datacenters, optimising energy efficiency, and cutting costs.

However, other computer titans such as Nvidia and Intel provide formidable competition for Fungible. Thanks to Microsoft’s purchase, the company should have more resources to devote to developing DPUs for use by Azure’s cloud services.

According to The Register (opens in new tab), “Fungible’s storage hardware has made it into VMware’s hardware compatibility list, but DPUs have not,” which might be a big deal for a tiny firm that has been struggling.

We don’t know if Microsoft will embrace, redesign, or completely shut down Fungible, and we probably never will.

Currently, according to Bablani, “the Fungible team will join Microsoft’s datacenter infrastructure engineering teams and will concentrate on offering numerous DPU solutions, network innovation, and hardware systems developments.”