One of Microsoft’s top silicon engineering executives, who helped launch the new Azure Cobalt processor and Azure Maia AI accelerator, has joined rival Google Cloud to lead the company’s silicon chip innovation.
Rehan Sheikh, Microsoft’s former vice president of silicon manufacturing and engineering, left to join rival Google Cloud to become one of the company’s silicon chip leaders.
At Microsoft, Sheikh (pictured) led the launch of Microsoft’s new Azure Cobalt processor and new Azure Maia 100 custom AI accelerator. Mr. Sheikh is a longtime silicon chip engineer whose career in IT included 24 years leading silicon engineering and productization at Intel.
He was hired last month as Google Cloud’s vice president of global silicon chip technology and manufacturing.
“I am very excited to begin this initiative and contribute to the growth of Google Cloud,” Sheikh said in a recent LinkedIn post, which garnered more than 200 comments. “I look forward to working with the many talented engineers and leaders at Google and the experts in the industry ecosystem.”
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The executive changes come as Google, Microsoft and other technology leaders pour investment and research and development into manufacturing their own processors due to high demand for artificial intelligence hardware from customers around the world.
Google has invested millions of dollars in developing AI-specific chips such as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and Arm-based Axion CPUs for its cloud customers. Google’s sixth generation and most powerful TPU, Trillium, became generally available in December.
Also in December, Google announced a new quantum chip called Willow that it says can outperform the world’s best supercomputers.
Former Microsoft, Intel Silicon role
Mr. Shaikh spent most of his IT career at Intel from 1997 to 2021.
At Intel, he led silicon engineering and productization as Intel’s principal test and silicon engineering technician. Mr. Sheikh led product segments including 5G data centers, discrete graphics, and Atom-based system-on-chip processors.
He joined Microsoft in 2021 as the company’s general manager of technology and product manufacturing engineering, leading company-wide silicon development efforts in many areas, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In 2023, Mr. Sheikh was promoted to Vice President of Silicon Manufacturing and Packaging Engineering at Microsoft.
“The past four years[at Microsoft]have been the most rewarding and fulfilling of my long silicon engineering career,” Sheikh wrote on LinkedIn in December. “We teamed up with our colleagues to launch the Maia 100 and Cobalt 100.”
Azure Cobalt 100 processors are Arm-based chips aimed at improving power and performance efficiency for a wide range of workloads.
Microsoft’s first generation custom AI accelerator, Azure Maia 100, is specifically designed for large-scale AI workloads deployed on Azure.
He could not be reached for comment by press time.
