Microsoft has announced a series of infrastructure updates during its Microsoft Build 2026 conference, including that its latest generation of Cobalt Arm chips is now available in early access preview.
The Cobalt 200 was detailed back in November 2025 by Microsoft, and according to the company, it has a 50 percent increase in performance compared to the previous generation, Cobalt 100, and is the result of an evaluation of more than 350,000 configuration candidates.
– Microsoft
Each Cobalt 200 SoC includes 132 active cores with 3MB of L2 cache per core and 192MB of L3 system cache. According to Microsoft, the Cobalt CPUs also offer individual per-core dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, which enables each of the 132 cores to run at a different performance level.
Azure Cobalt 200 Arm-based Virtual Machines (VMs) are now available in early access preview. The VMs can scale up to 128 vCPUs. According to Microsoft, compared to the previous generation, they offer up to 135 percent better performance for cloud database workloads and 80 percent for caching workloads, and are fully compatible with workloads currently running on the previous generation chip.
