Microsoft’s new AI chip makes it less reliant on Nvidia’s GPUs
Microsoft’s Maia 300 chip. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is announcing its third-generation Maia in-house AI chip today, designed to be the "primary AI inference system" for Microsoft's products and services. Maia 300 not only improves the cost and efficiency of running AI workloads in the cloud, it's also more capable of handling the latest reasoning models and agentic tasks. Maia 300 will start being rolled out to production in 2027, and it has been designed with efficiency in mind. "We expect Maia 300 to deliver 40 percent more tokens per megawatt compared to leading GPU-based systems," says Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft's cloud group. "And in a full 96-acceler … Read the full story at The Verge.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Microsoft’s new AI chip makes it less reliant on Nvidia’s GPUs
The new Maia 300 chip will start rolling out to production AI workloads in 2027.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Microsoft’s Maia 300 chip. Image: Microsoft
is a senior correspondent and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years.
Microsoft is announcing its third-generation Maia in-house AI chip today, designed to be the “primary AI inference system” for Microsoft’s products and services. Maia 300 not only improves the cost and efficiency of running AI workloads in the cloud, it’s also more capable of handling the latest reasoning models and agentic tasks.
Maia 300 will start being rolled out to production in 2027, and it has been designed with efficiency in mind. “We expect Maia 300 to deliver 40 percent more tokens per megawatt compared to leading GPU-based systems,” says Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s cloud group. “And in a full 96-accelerator configuration, it delivers up to 7x the rack-scale token throughput of Maia 200.”
These efficiency improvements will allow Microsoft to rely mainly on its in-house AI chips soon, instead of ones from Nvidia and AMD. “We will scale our Azure Maia family to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027, making Maia the primary AI inference system for Microsoft products and services,” says Guthrie.
Maia 300 chips will start being used for production workloads in 2027. Image: Microsoft
Maia 300 is a successor to the 200, which was only announced in January. Maia 200 is already running on production AI workloads across Microsoft, including Microsoft Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, and Microsoft’s own AI models.
“Maia 200 is the best performing AI infrastructure in our fleet, measured in real world metrics for AI services,” says Guthrie. “Maia 300 is a complete AI system designed for the new types of AI workloads emerging today: Long-context reasoning, latency-sensitive conversational experiences, and sustained, multi-step agentic tasks.”
Microsoft is finally making custom chips — and they’re all about AI
Microsoft’s latest AI chip goes head-to-head with Amazon and Google
Microsoft is using a new chiplet architecture to get its all-important efficiency gains. Built on TSMC’s N2P process node, the latest Maia 300 architecture separates compute, memory controller, and I/O functions. “This increases the silicon area dedicated to compute performance and allows each function to use the technology best suited to its role,” says the Azure hardware and infrastructure team.
Maia 300 is also a key part of Microsoft’s own AI model work, and could help the company achieve its goal of catching up with Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. “We have to work across the full stack, all the way down to the silicon,” says Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman. “At that scale we need a platform that we own, and that we co-design with our models. That’s why running our Microsoft AI models on top of the Maia chip is a critical focus for our team.”
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
A college in Illinois tried to cancel its Flock contact and it refused
GTA VI leaks continue with a lengthy (and very nude) gameplay video
Decade-old RAM is making a comeback
Learning to use local AI is exciting, overwhelming, and frustrating
What to expect from Apple’s ‘Welcome Home’ event
A free daily digest of the news that matters most.
By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
This is the title for the native ad