Microsoft’s new AI chip makes it less reliant on Nvidia’s GPUs
Microsoft has unveiled its third-generation Maia AI chip, designed to handle complex reasoning and agentic tasks more efficiently than current GPU-based systems. The company plans to make Maia the primary inference system for its cloud services by 2027.
Why it matters
This move signals Microsoft's strategic effort to reduce its heavy reliance on Nvidia hardware for AI infrastructure.
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.”
Get smarter about the news
Sign up free for a feed built around what you actually care about, Dive Deeper research on any story, and the full text of every article.
Create free accountAlready have an account? Sign in