The launch of World of Warcraft: Forever utilized a massive cloud infrastructure consisting of 3,924 virtual machines. This deployment featured 70,480 CPU cores and 251,136 GB of memory, which is equivalent to 251 TB, powered by Microsoft's Azure platform.
Comparatively, Blizzard's 2009 setup for the game spanned 10 global data centers with 13,250 server blades. While that legacy system used 75,000 CPU cores and 112.5 TB of RAM, the new Forever environment uses 6% fewer cores but 2.2 times the total memory capacity.
This shift highlights the evolving hardware demands for modern gaming under Microsoft ownership. By leveraging Azure, Blizzard has significantly increased memory density over its 2009 peak, optimizing core counts while doubling the available RAM resources.