Microsoft has launched a new team focused on the intersection of supercomputing and artificial intelligence workloads.

The AI Supercomputer Infrastructure team is led by Microsoft veteran Daniel Firestone, who spent over a decade deploying SmartNICs and other networking components.

He was responsible for the dataplane of Azure Boost, a high performance, SmartNIC-based virtualized infrastructure for data center networking and storage at 100/200/400Gb/s and beyond.

"It's hard to believe that 15 years of shipping SmartNICs and our Host Networking and offload stacks in Azure went by so quickly... but with our third generation of Azure Boost shipping and scaling successfully at 400G earlier this year, I've decided to take on something new and dive into our rapidly scaling AI infrastructure in Azure," Firestone said on LinkedIn.

The team will support customers' "most demanding training jobs, and large-scale inference workloads," Firestone said.

He added: "I'm incredibly proud of everything our HostNet team accomplished over the years since Alireza Dabagh and I started it many years ago. The early SmartNICs were revolutionary HW-SW codesigns for their time, and the Azure Boost program has delivered lots of value and highly performant and reliable compute and AI SKUs for our customers over the years."

The new team is set to hire roles across ICs, tech leads, and engineering managers. "If you're passionate about working on some of the industry's largest supercomputers or bleeding-edge AI workloads at the infra layer, please reach out, and I'd love to chat!" Firestone said.