The spread of artificial intelligence is emerging as a new growth driver across the enterprise hardware market, as companies and cloud providers race to build AI infrastructure. Demand for AI servers is lifting results at major IT firms, while storage vendors and PC makers also benefit. Memory makers gain from surging needs for high-bandwidth memory used in AI servers. Concerns that AI would hurt software firms appear limited, as many reposition AI as a growth engine.

Microsoft said on Wednesday it has strengthened the scalability of Azure Local and unveiled capabilities that provide a large-scale cloud infrastructure environment allowing deployment of up to thousands of servers within a single sovereign environment. Built on Microsoft’s Sovereign Private Cloud, Azure Local delivers a cloud-consistent infrastructure on organisation-owned hardware. It also supports deployments in disconnected environments and gives local control of security and compliance settings.