Microsoft will make its own Maia chips the primary system for running AI in its products starting in 2027. The company set out the plan on Monday as it unveiled the Maia 300, the third generation of its custom AI chip.
Microsoft plans deployments measured in gigawatts starting next year, which could mean more than a million Maia 300 chips in 2027.
The chip is built for inference, the work of running AI models once they are trained. Microsoft said it targets long conversations, reasoning, and AI agents that carry out multi-step tasks.
For each megawatt of power, Microsoft expects Maia 300 to generate 40% more tokens, the units of text AI models produce, than top GPU systems.
It did not say which systems it measured against. A full rack also delivers up to seven times the output of its predecessor, Maia 200, the company said.
Each rack holds 96 chips and draws about 167 kilowatts. By comparison, Nvidia’s latest GB300 racks hold 72 GPUs and draw about 142 kilowatts, according to Reuters.
Inside, Microsoft has split the chip into smaller pieces, called chiplets, for computing, memory, and data transfer. The computing parts use TSMC’s N2P process, and each chip carries eight stacks of HBM4 memory.
“It’s basically delivering more intelligence for every watt, every dollar, and every byte of memory by optimizing across the entire system,” Rani Borkar, who runs Azure hardware systems and infrastructure at Microsoft, told Reuters.
Maia 200 is already in use. It serves Microsoft Copilot and runs OpenAI models alongside Microsoft’s own MAI models, and it will support GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Foundry by the end of the year.
The launch follows a push by cloud giants and AI firms to cut their reliance on Nvidia. Google and Amazon have their own AI chips, and OpenAI has built its own chip with Broadcom.
Microsoft has also been working to secure factory capacity. In August, The Information reported that it was in talks with TSMC to make more than 300,000 Maia 300 chips for 2027.
Microsoft plans to share more about the chip at its Ignite conference in San Francisco next month.