Microsoft makes ‘biggest bet yet’ on its own silicon, unveils new AI chip to reduce reliance on Nvidia

What happened

The company on Monday unveiled Maia 300, the third generation of its custom AI chip, saying it will begin large-scale deployments in 2027. The company says the new chip does more AI work with the same amount of electricity than the GPU (a chip built for many calculations at once, used for graphics and AI)-based systems that power most AI today. NVIDIA is a semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, and its products and services include graphics processing units.

A prototype of Microsoft’s Azure Maia 300 chip, which the company plans to begin deploying at scale in 2027. In a blog post , Azure chief Scott Guthrie said Maia will become “the primary AI inference system for Microsoft products and services.” Microsoft is a software and software development company based in Redmond, and its products and services include Azure.

Maia 300 will produce 40% more AI output for the same amount of power as leading GPU-based systems, which Nvidia dominates, according to the company. They’re designed for the kinds of tasks that are growing fastest, such as AI agents (AI that carries out multi-step tasks rather than answering one question) that work through multistep jobs and models that handle long documents or conversations.