Microsoft bets on homegrown AI chip to challenge Nvidia

Microsoft announced Monday it will deploy its in-house Maia AI chips at massive scale starting in 2027, aiming to reduce reliance on Nvidia for the hardware running products like Microsoft 365 Copilot. The company says its Maia 200 chip is already operational across the US, Europe, and Australia, with a more powerful Maia 300 launching in 2027, manufactured by TSMC.

Microsoft claims Maia 200 delivers up to 1.7 times the output per watt of 'leading' GPU-based systems, and that Maia 300 will do 40% more AI work on the same electricity as those unnamed leading systems, more than double its own previous chip. Each server rack will hold twice as many chips as before and handle up to seven times the workload, the company said, as it races against Nvidia, AMD, Amazon, and Google in the booming inference market.

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