Microsoft unveils Maia 300 AI chip to reduce reliance on Nvidia

What happened

The post Microsoft unveils Maia 300 AI chip to reduce reliance on Nvidia appeared first on Crypto Briefing . 12, 2026 Microsoft has introduced the Maia 300, its third-generation in-house AI chip, and it has a very specific job in mind. Microsoft is a software and software development company based in Redmond. NVIDIA is a semiconductor company based in Santa Clara.

The company says the chip is designed to serve as the “primary AI inference system” behind Microsoft’s own products and services. What Microsoft is promising The headline metric is energy efficiency.

Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s cloud group, put a number on it. For the uninitiated, tokens (the small pieces of text a model reads and writes) are the small chunks of text an AI model reads and writes.

More tokens per megawatt means more AI output for the same electricity bill, which matters when power has become one of the tightest constraints on data center (a building full of computers that runs online services) growth. It is a target, not a benchmark anyone has independently verified yet.

So customers and investors are evaluating a promise with a lead time measured in quarters, not weeks. From tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands The real story may be scale.

Key facts

• 12, 2026 Microsoft has — introduced: the Maia 300, its third-generation in-house AI chip, and it has a very specific job in mind