Battleground is a term we use a lot when talking about the AI Revolution. The thing is, with the speed of change across every corner of the AI industry, there’s no better way to describe the emerging fronts and the players winning these mini-combats. One such battle is taking place in the AI infrastructure space, and a recent move by Microsoft has changed the game, moving the focus away from chips and deeper into the wider technology stack, where networking and connectivity are becoming just as strategically important as power.
The company has announced a strategic partnership with manufacturing giant 3M, centered on 3M’s Expanded Beam Optical (EBO) technology. Microsoft has become the first hyperscaler to deploy EBO technology in its Azure data centers. Unlike traditional fiber connectors that rely on direct physical contact, EBO uses an expanded beam optical interface, making fiber connections faster to install, more tolerant of contamination, and easier to maintain.
“At Microsoft, we’re redefining the foundation of cloud and AI infrastructure, combining our own innovations with advances from partners like 3M to build datacenters that are faster to deploy, more resilient and ready for the scale of AI,” said Cliff Henson, Corporate Vice President, Cloud Supply Chain and Engineering at Microsoft.
“3M’s EBO solution will help unlock new levels of performance, reliability and efficiency to ensure customers can run their cloud and AI workloads on a trusted, sustainable and advanced environment.”
Data Center Innovation
Onboarding EBO technology will give Microsoft the edge in numerous areas. It will slash the time Microsoft spends cleaning and inspecting its network infrastructure, boosting efficiency and helping engineers bring new AI capacity online more quickly.
At the same time, early experiments have found that, in certain environments, network deployment times have been reduced while the company has also reported better reliability in dense AI networking environments. Signals have also remained strong in live data center scenarios where components are often exposed to dust and handled frequently. The robustness of the EBO design is giving Microsoft an advantage, particularly as hyperscalers race to build ever-larger AI infrastructure capable of supporting next-generation foundation models and enterprise AI workloads.
From the 3M side, regarding how Microsoft will impact its business, 3M will deploy Microsoft AI technologies to help it achieve its AI transformation efforts at the enterprise level. Microsoft has also just landed itself, with 3M, another major client for its recently launched Frontier Company, having deployed engineers to help 3M’s Global Business Services team automate order management. You can read more analysis about the newly formed Frontier Company here.
Final Thoughts
With the battle lines shifting all the time, anything the companies leading the AI Revolution can do to inch ahead is critical. When it comes to infrastructure, whether it’s networking, optics, power, cooling, or deployment speed, the decisions they make, and more importantly, the partners they choose, will define the success of these massive AI projects. Here, even incremental improvements can translate into massive competitive advantages.
Still, it’s hard to say how long this first-mover advantage will last. 3M is already scaling production of its EBO technology to meet the growing demand from organizations building the data centers powering the AI boom. However, in this extremely competitive environment, it doesn’t really matter. Any advantage, regardless of how long you can maintain it, is a strategic win, especially when the pace of AI infrastructure investment means today’s engineering breakthrough can become tomorrow’s industry standard.
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