How Azure Cobalt 100 VMs are powering real-world solutions, delivering performance and efficiency results

• Published Sep 23, 2025
• 4 min read

Cobalt 100 systems are designed to present precocious performance, vigor efficiency, and outgo effectiveness for a wide scope of workloads.

Azure Cobalt 100 is our in-house, custom-built, Arm-based unreality CPU powering wide compute workloads successful the cloud. Cobalt 100 systems are designed to present precocious performance, vigor efficiency, and outgo effectiveness for a wide scope of workloads. Cobalt 100 systems person been live for astir a twelvemonth and present disposable successful 29 Microsoft datacenter regions globally, delivering meaningful results and benefits to Azure customers crossed industries.

Cobalt 100, Microsoft’s in-house CPU for the cloud

Cloud analytics leaders similar Databricks and Snowflake are adopting Cobalt 100 VMs to enactment their information platforms. These companies grip monolithic volumes of information and trust connected scalable infrastructure to present real-time insights and instrumentality learning capabilities. The equilibrium of compute powerfulness and vigor ratio offered by Cobalt 100 VMs makes it an perfect prime for large-scale information processing.

We proceed to spot adoption of Cobalt 100 VMs from customers who are achieving existent satellite show and ratio gains:

“At OneTrust, we’re perpetually optimizing our level to present scalable, high-performance solutions for AI-ready governance. The Azure Cobalt 100 VMs correspond a large advancement successful unreality infrastructure, and we’ve seen meaningful improvements successful throughput and ratio during our evaluations. Microsoft’s innovation successful Arm-based architecture enables america to amended service our planetary endeavor customers with faster, much cost-effective services.”

“At Siemens, we’re committed to pushing the boundaries of silicon verification performance. By adopting Azure Cobalt 100 VMs, we’ve achieved up to a  20% show boost  successful our Questa One DFT simulations – accelerating responsibility and ceremonial verification cycles crossed analog, memory, and integer workloads. This leap successful ratio empowers our teams to present faster, much reliable results for 1 of the astir analyzable designs successful the industry.” 

“We conducted extended benchmarking of the caller Cobalt 100 VMs for containerized exertion workloads moving connected AKS and observed measurable price-performance gains compared to Azure’s previous-generation Arm-based VM series, with improvements evident crossed some throughput and cost-efficiency metrics. Following these results, we person migrated 70% of our AKS workloads to Cobalt 100 VMs and are successful the process of migrating the remaining 30%.”

 “Temenos is arrogant to acceptable a caller manufacture benchmark for scalable, AI-powered banking connected Microsoft Azure, leveraging the breakthrough show of Cobalt 100 VMs. The operation of Temenos’ cloud-native level and Azure’s Arm-based Cobalt 100 VMs allowed america to achieve over 40% ratio improvement compared to the 2024 benchmark exercise, enabling banks to tally demanding workloads with greater ratio and sustainability. This collaboration empowers fiscal institutions to innovate faster and standard securely, transforming the aboriginal of integer banking.”  

Microsoft’s ain services are besides benefiting from the adoption of Cobalt 100 VMs. The deployment of Cobalt 100 VMs for Microsoft’s services demonstrates its quality to enactment large-scale, mission-critical applications.

Microsoft Teams has achieved up to 45% amended performance utilizing these VMs than antecedently possible. Teams is simply a latency-sensitive exertion that serves millions of users worldwide, and the quality to process requests much efficiently has a nonstop interaction connected idiosyncratic experience. The media processor capableness successful Teams—supporting audio/video streaming—runs connected Cobalt 100 VMs with little compute footprint. That translates to assets simplification of up to 35% less compute cores needed for the workload. Cobalt 100 VMs unlock exceptional efficiency, empowering teams to execute more, faster, with less resources.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) is simply a cloud-native information work with hundreds of microservices that execute menace detection, information analysis, and extortion astatine monolithic scale. We person seen 40% amended show successful MDE’s cyber information curator, moving connected Cobalt 100 VMs. Curator groups high-volume information into partitions successful existent clip for fast, scalable processing. Faster processing and higher throughput construe to amended idiosyncratic experiences, including faster menace effect successful MDE.

These results underscore the worth of Microsoft’s attack to designer and make customized infrastructure; Cobalt 100 is not conscionable a caller benignant of wide compute VM, but 1 of the astir optimized compute products successful Azure. Whether it’s accelerating merchandise development, scaling analytics platforms, oregon improving idiosyncratic experiences, customers are uncovering that the operation of performance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness makes Cobalt 100 VMs a compelling prime for modern unreality workloads.

Cobalt 100 demonstrates Microsoft’s end-to-end systems strategy successful practice. By designing the CPU in-house and optimizing it for Azure’s infrastructure, Microsoft has created a tightly integrated infrastructure that delivers accordant show crossed a assortment of unreality scenarios. This attack allows for amended power implicit powerfulness consumption, thermal management, and workload distribution, resulting successful a almighty and businesslike unreality environment.

As much organizations look to modernize their infrastructure and follow cloud-native technologies, the request for highly performant and energy-efficient compute resources volition proceed to grow. Azure Cobalt 100 VMs are well-positioned to conscionable this demand, offering a scalable and sustainable solution for a wide scope of applications.

By delivering faster, much businesslike computing, Azure Cobalt 100 empowers organizations to propulsion the boundaries of what’s imaginable with amended terms show crossed manufacture usage cases successful their respective fields.

• Start your travel connected Cobalt 100 VMs – try today! 
• Check retired the Cobalt 100 panel from Arm and Azure astatine Microsoft Build 2025.
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