An Apple employee Mike Filippo took Microsoft's offer to join their team. He was hired with the goal of creating custom semiconductors for Azure cloud service.

Filippo is an electrical engineer who designed chips for Intel, Arm, and, most recently, Apple. At Arm, Filippo was the lead architect for Neoverse V1, a CPU design covering servers, storage systems, and networking equipment. Filippo will work under Rani Borkar, corporate VP of Azure hardware systems and infrastructure.

Public cloud rivals Amazon Web Services and Google are both investing in their own server chips. AWS claims its Graviton processors are ideally suited to handle its public cloud workloads and Google is working with Intel, after successfully launching its Tensor processor for Pixel smartphones. Currently, all the public cloud providers rely on Intel, AMD, and Nvidia for many of the processors used to power cloud-based servers.