Microsoft officials told Bloomberg that the company is committed to use ARM chips in machines running its cloud services.

Microsoft will use the ARM chips in a cloud server design that its officials will detail at the US Open Compute Project Summit today. Microsoft has been working with both Qualcomm and Cavium on the version of Windows Server for ARM.

Microsoft joined the Open Compute Project (OCP) in 2014, and is a founding member of and contributor to the organisation's Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) project.

The OCP publishes open hardware designs intended to be used to build cheaper datacentres. The OCP has released specs for motherboards, chipsets, cabling, and common sockets, connectors, and open networking and switches.

Vole’s cloud server specification is a a 12U shared server chassis capable of housing 24 1U servers. Microsoft is also releasing its Chassis Manager under the open-source Apache license.

Project Olympus is the codename for Vole’s next-generation cloud hardware design that it contributed last autumn Fall to the OCP.

Vole is also expected to use ARM processors in its Olympus systems which will be headed to its data systems by Christmas.

The winner appears to be Qualcomm which says it is working on a variety of cloud workloads to run on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform powered by Qualcomm Centriq 2400 server solutions.

Qualcomm said it had been working with Vole for several years on ARM-based server enablement and has onsite engineering at Microsoft to collaboratively optimise a version of Windows Server, for Microsoft's internal use in its data centres, on Qualcomm Centriq 2400-based systems.

There's no word from Microsoft when it will begin offering Windows Server on ARM to external customers or partners, but that is only a matter of time. With less power the need for Intel’s use in the server room becomes less important and if ARM designs become more established because of Microsoft’s blessing, it is unlikely that anyone will want Chipzilla there.