At Microsoft Build 2026, Microsoft announced the preview of Azure Cobalt 200, the second generation of its custom Arm silicon for cloud-native and agentic AI workloads. Ubuntu and Ubuntu Pro are available from the start of the preview, so your existing Ubuntu workloads run on Cobalt 200 with little or no change.
A few things worth highlighting:
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It’s the same Ubuntu you already run. Cobalt 200 uses the same 64-bit Arm architecture as Cobalt 100, and more than 95% of the Ubuntu archive is built and tested for Arm. Moving over is a deployment decision, not an engineering project.
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Built for scale-out and agentic AI. Open-source databases, in-memory caches, real-time analytics, microservices, and the dense, concurrent execution sandboxes that agentic workloads create are exactly what this generation targets.
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Production-ready with Ubuntu Pro. Up to 15 years of security maintenance, plus Kernel Livepatch on Arm64 from Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (Resolute Raccoon) onward, and Landscape for fleet management across your Azure estate.
Azure Cobalt 200 VMs are in preview now. Full details, including how to request access and get started, are in the blog post:
Ubuntu and Ubuntu Pro on Azure Cobalt 200 VMs
Ubuntu has been available on Azure Cobalt since the first generation, and we’re looking forward to seeing what the community builds on Cobalt 200.