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Here are some links for Project Catapult (Microsoft Research initiative for large scale FPGA deployment in DCs) which includes Project brainwave (TPU competitor):

Landing page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-cat...

Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NJ-faSklzs

Blog post: https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/the_moonshot_that_succeeded/

a good place to shove it: imagine how much they save on intra-dc encryption offloading, real time compression or traffic shaping

Amazon also do similar with their ENA [0]. James Hamilton talked about it in 2016 [1].

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/06/introduci...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyOAjFNPAbA&t=1820

The youtube link at the 35:00 mark says that the networking is an custom ASIC not an FPGA. "Amazon Annapurna ASIC" is what the slide says.

Are the ENA instances using something else?

First gen ENA (never publicly acknowledged AFAIK) was an FPGA, second gen is an ASIC.

Can you say what additional processing those FGPAs in Azure are doing?