How Microsoft is changing the future of cloud computing and online services: In 2012 Doug Burger, a computer chip researcher at Microsoft, pitched an idea titled Project Catapult to then CEO Steve Ballmer. Burger believed the tech world would soon need new architecture to run the tech giants, including both software and hardware. At the core of his idea are the Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). Though companies like Intel continue to improve CPUs, these chips can’t keep up with advances in software, in large part because of the new wave in artificial intelligence, writes Cade Metz for Wired. It’s too expensive to create specialized, purpose-built chips for every new problem. FPGAs bridge the gap. They let engineers build chips that are faster and less energy-hungry than an assembly-line, general-purpose CPU, but customizable so they handle the new problems of ever-shifting technologies and business models. Microsoft’s services are so large, and they use so many FPGAs, that they’re shifting the worldwide chip market. The FPGAs come from a company called Altera, and Intel executive VP Diane Bryant says Microsoft is why Intel acquired Altera last summer—a deal worth USD 16.7 bn, the largest acquisition in the history of the largest chipmaker on Earth. By 2020, she says, a third of all servers inside all the major cloud computing companies will include FPGAs.