Overview
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 is also more capable of handling the latest reasoning models and agentic tasks.
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.
Performance and Efficiency
Maia 300 will start being rolled out to production in 2027, and it has been designed with efficiency in mind. Microsoft expects Maia 300 to deliver 40 percent more tokens per megawatt compared to leading GPU-based systems, 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. The company plans to scale its Azure Maia family to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027.
Maia 300 chips will start being used for production workloads in 2027.
Evolution from Maia 200
Maia 300 is a successor to the 200, which was 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 noted as the best performing AI infrastructure in the company fleet, measured in real world metrics for AI services. Maia 300 is built as a complete AI system designed for the new types of AI workloads emerging today, such as long-context reasoning, latency-sensitive conversational experiences, and sustained, multi-step agentic tasks.
Chiplet Architecture
Microsoft is using a new chiplet architecture to get its efficiency gains. Built on TSMC’s N2P process node, the latest Maia 300 architecture separates compute, memory controller, and I/O functions, which increases the silicon area dedicated to compute performance.
Maia 300 is a key part of Microsoft’s own AI model work, and could help the company achieve its goal of catching up with competitors. Running Microsoft AI models on top of the Maia chip remains a critical focus for the team as they work across the full stack down to the silicon.
