Exploring AI CPU-Inferencing with Azure Cobalt 100

💡 Update A couple of weeks after this post went live, Microsoft unveiled the Azure Cobalt 200 , a custom Arm Neoverse V3–based CPU. The successor to Cobalt 100 entered private preview in June 2026. Better yet, at Microsoft Build 2026, they published a hands-on public Build lab for Azure Cobalt 200. The lab demonstrates CPU-only AI inference on Arm64 with Phi-4-mini, INT4 quantization, and ONNX…