How Azure Cobalt 100 VMs are powering real-world solutions, delivering performance and efficiency results
The Cobalt 100 systems are crafted to deliver outstanding performance, exceptional energy efficiency, and cost-effectiveness for a variety of workloads.
The Azure Cobalt 100 is a custom-built, Arm-based cloud CPU designed for general computing tasks in the cloud. These systems have been operating for nearly a year and are now accessible in 29 Microsoft datacenter regions worldwide, providing significant advantages and benefits to Azure users across different industries.
Prominent leaders in cloud analytics, such as Databricks and Snowflake, are integrating Cobalt 100 VMs into their data platforms. These companies manage vast amounts of data and rely on scalable infrastructure to provide real-time insights and machine learning capabilities. The synergy of compute power and energy efficiency that Cobalt 100 VMs offer makes them the perfect choice for extensive data processing.
We’re witnessing a growing adoption of Cobalt 100 VMs, with customers reporting tangible improvements in performance and efficiency:
“At OneTrust, we’re always enhancing our platform to deliver scalable, high-performance solutions for AI-driven governance. The Azure Cobalt 100 VMs mark a major leap in cloud infrastructure, leading to noticeable boosts in throughput and efficiency during our assessments. Microsoft’s innovation in Arm-based architecture allows us to serve our global enterprise clients with quicker, more cost-effective services.”
— Steve Finch, VP of Architecture & Ops, OneTrust
“At Siemens, we’re dedicated to advancing silicon verification performance. By using Azure Cobalt 100 VMs, we’ve realised an impressive 20% performance uplift in our Questa One DFT simulations — speeding up fault and formal verification cycles across analog, memory, and digital workloads. This increase in efficiency empowers our teams to deliver quicker, more reliable results for one of the industry’s most intricate designs.”
– Abhi Kolpekwar, VP & GM, Siemens EDA, Siemens Digital Industries Software
“We thoroughly benchmarked the new Cobalt 100 VMs for containerised applications running on AKS and observed significant price-performance enhancements compared to Azure’s previous-generation Arm-based VM series. These improvements were apparent in both throughput and cost-efficiency metrics. Following these findings, we migrated 70% of our AKS workloads to Cobalt 100 VMs, with plans to move the remaining 30% soon.”
— Gopala Krishna Padidadakala, Sr Director of Cloud Engineering, Sprinklr
“Temenos is pleased to set a new industry standard for scalable, AI-powered banking on Microsoft Azure, harnessing the remarkable performance of Cobalt 100 VMs. The collaboration of Temenos’ cloud-native platform and Azure’s Arm-based Cobalt 100 VMs has allowed us to attain over 40% improvement in efficiency compared to the 2024 benchmark, enabling banks to manage demanding workloads with heightened efficiency and sustainability. This partnership equips financial institutions to innovate faster and scale securely, transforming the digital banking landscape.”
— Eugene Khmelevsky, Head of Architecture and Data, Temenos
Microsoft’s own services are also reaping the benefits from deploying Cobalt 100 VMs, showcasing their capability to support extensive, mission-critical applications.
Microsoft Teams has achieved an increase of up to 45% in performance thanks to these VMs. As a latency-sensitive application serving millions globally, the efficiency in processing requests has a direct positive impact on user experience. The media processor in Teams—essential for audio/video streaming—runs on Cobalt 100 VMs with a reduced compute footprint. This results in a reduction of up to 35% in required compute cores for the workload. Cobalt 100 VMs open the door to exceptional efficiency, allowing teams to do more, faster, with fewer resources.
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) is a cloud-native security service featuring hundreds of microservices dedicated to threat detection, data analysis, and large-scale protection. We have recorded a stunning 40% improvement in MDE’s cyber data curator performance, running on Cobalt 100 VMs. This curator manages high-volume data in real-time, enabling rapid, scalable processing. The quicker processing and increased throughput foster a superior user experience, leading to faster threat responses in MDE.
These outcomes highlight the effectiveness of Microsoft’s strategy to architect and develop tailored infrastructure. The Cobalt 100 isn’t merely a new variety of general compute VM; it stands as one of the most optimised compute products available in Azure. Whether it’s accelerating product development, scaling analytics platforms, or enhancing user experiences, customers find that the mix of performance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness makes Cobalt 100 VMs a standout choice for contemporary cloud workloads.
Cobalt 100 exemplifies Microsoft’s end-to-end systems strategy in action. By crafting the CPU internally and fine-tuning it for Azure’s framework, Microsoft has established a seamlessly integrated system that ensures consistent performance over a multitude of cloud scenarios. This method allows for better energy consumption control, thermal management, and workload distribution, creating a powerful and efficient cloud environment.
As more organisations move towards modernising their infrastructure and embracing cloud-native technologies, the demand for high-performance, energy-efficient computing resources will rise. Azure Cobalt 100 VMs are positioned to meet this rising demand, providing a scalable and sustainable solution for diverse applications.
By offering faster, more effective computing, Azure Cobalt 100 enables organisations to explore new possibilities and achieve better price performance in their specific industry use cases.
