Microsoft unveils Maia 300 AI chip as it works to reduce dependence on Nvidia and AMD

Microsoft announced Maia 300, the third generation of its in-house AI accelerator, and said the Maia family will become the primary inference system for its products and services, with multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027. The company claims Maia 300 delivers 40% more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU-based systems and up to 7x the rack-scale throughput of Maia 200, with 96 chips per rack and compute chiplets built on TSMC's N2P process. Maia 200, announced in January, already runs Microsoft 365 Copilot and OpenAI models on Azure. Evercore ISI analysts estimate Maia will make up about 10% of Microsoft's AI chip spending by early 2027.