At Microsoft Build 2026, Canonical announced that Ubuntu and Ubuntu Pro are available on Azure Cobalt 200 virtual machines from the moment the preview opens. Cobalt 200 is Microsoft’s second-generation custom Arm silicon, and having Ubuntu ready on day one means anyone joining the preview can start working without setting anything up by hand.
What the new silicon brings
Cobalt 200 keeps the same 64-bit Arm architecture as the earlier Cobalt 100, so software that already ran on those machines runs here too. The hardware is where things change. The chip ships with memory encryption enabled by default and built-in acceleration for compression and encryption, both of which take work off the CPU and matter for data-heavy services. Microsoft also adds new VM families aimed at memory-intensive and storage-dense workloads.
The target is clear: cloud-native and agentic AI work. Open-source databases, in-memory caches, real-time analytics, microservices, media processing, containerized services. The kind of workloads that already move to Arm for power and cost, now on a more capable chip.
Why Ubuntu fits Arm
More than 95% of the Ubuntu archive is built and tested for Arm. That figure is what separates “your distro boots on Arm” from “your whole production stack works on Arm”. If you work with .NET, Java, Python, Rust or C++, the runtimes are covered and you won’t hit packages that only exist for x86.
The part that matters most for production is kernel Livepatch on Arm64, which arrives with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (Resolute Raccoon). Until now Livepatch was available on x86 but not on Arm. With 26.04 you can apply critical and high-severity kernel fixes without rebooting the machine. Across a fleet of VMs serving real traffic, skipping the reboot is not a small convenience. It’s the difference between patching the day a fix ships and waiting for a maintenance window that can take weeks to arrive.
What Ubuntu Pro adds
Ubuntu Pro adds up to 15 years of security maintenance for the base OS and open-source packages, the same offering on Arm and on x86. It includes Landscape for fleet management, automated patching and audit reporting. If you run many VMs spread across regions, that centralized management is what keeps each machine from drifting on its own.
Joining requires a preview signup, and deployment happens through the Azure portal, the CLI, the SDKs, PowerShell or whatever tooling you already use. There’s no separate flow for Cobalt 200: it’s the same Ubuntu you already know, on a different chip.
If you run infrastructure on Azure and were eyeing Arm for the compute bill, this mix of new hardware plus Livepatch on Arm64 removes two of the usual reasons to stay on x86: performance per watt and patching without downtime.
Source
Based on Canonical’s official announcement: Ubuntu and Ubuntu Pro on Azure Cobalt 200 VMs (ubuntu.com/blog). Credit to Canonical.