Ubuntu and Ubuntu Pro on Azure Cobalt 200 VMs

At 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 on Cobalt 200 from the start of preview, so your existing Ubuntu workloads run on Cobalt 200 with little or no change. Moving to this new generation of Azure silicon is a change of hardware, not a change of platform.

The same Ubuntu you already run

Adoption is straightforward because the operating system does not change. Cobalt 200 uses the same 64-bit Arm architecture as Cobalt 100, and Ubuntu has run on Arm64 across the stack for years:

• More than 95% of the Ubuntu archive is built and tested for Arm, so the tools, libraries, and applications you depend on are already available.
• Major languages and runtimes, including .NET, Java, Python, Rust, and C++, provide Arm-native versions.
• Official Ubuntu images and Ubuntu Pro are available on both x86 and Arm, so you operate one platform, not two.

For most teams, running on Cobalt 200 is a deployment decision, not an engineering project.

Built for cloud-native and agentic AI

Cobalt 200 is designed for scale-out, cloud-native workloads, and its new VM families extend that reach to memory-intensive and storage-dense services. These are the workloads the Ubuntu ecosystem is already built around: open-source databases, in-memory caches, real-time analytics, microservices, media processing, and containerized services.

Agentic AI is a clear focus of this generation, and it is also a focus for Ubuntu. These workloads create and run many execution sandboxes concurrently, the kind of dense, scale-out compute Cobalt 200 is built for. Combined with Cobalt 200 features such as memory encryption enabled by default and built-in acceleration for compression and encryption, Ubuntu provides an efficient foundation for agentic services on Azure.

Ready for production with Ubuntu Pro

Running production workloads on new silicon means keeping them secure and maintained over the long term. Ubuntu Pro provides:

• Up to 15 years of security maintenance for the Ubuntu base OS and thousands of open-source packages.
• Kernel Livepatch, available on Arm64 from Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (Resolute Raccoon) onward, applies critical and high-severity kernel fixes without rebooting, so long-running database, analytics, and AI services stay available.
• Landscape for fleet management, automated patching, and audit reporting across your Azure estate.

Ubuntu Pro on Arm is the same offering you run on x86, so the operating model you already use across Azure carries over unchanged when these workloads move into production.

Get started

Azure Cobalt 200 VMs are available in preview now. Request access through the Cobalt 200 preview signup form, then deploy Ubuntu using the Azure portal, CLI, SDKs, PowerShell, or your existing tooling, and enable Ubuntu Pro for long-term security maintenance and Livepatch. To learn more about Ubuntu on Azure, visit ubuntu.com/azure.

Ubuntu has been available on Azure Cobalt since the first generation, and we look forward to seeing what teams build on Cobalt 200.