Microsoft bets on homegrown AI chip to challenge Nvidia

The company said the Maia 200 chip is already operational, including for the Microsoft 365 Copilot assistant, while a more powerful successor will launch in 2027.(AFP) — Microsoft said Monday it will roll out its in-house Maia artificial intelligence chips on a massive scale starting in 2027, making them the main hardware for running AI across its products — a move that could reduce its reliance on Nvidia.Chips like Maia are the technology inside the vast data centers powering the AI boom, and Microsoft plans to deploy enough of them to draw several gigawatts of electricity — roughly the output of several large nuclear reactors.Nvidia has held a near lock on the chips used to train AI models, but tech giants and rival chipmakers are now racing to stake out positions in inference — the work of running those models to answer questions and carry out tasks once they are up and running.That market is expanding fast as companies roll out AI assistants and so-called agents that perform multistep jobs on their own, with Nvidia, AMD, Amazon and Google all introducing new products in the space.“Today marks a new phase for Microsoft’s AI infrastructure,” Microsoft Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie wrote in a blog post announcing the plans.The company said the Maia 200 chip is already operational, including for the Microsoft 365 Copilot assistant, while a more powerful successor, the Maia 300, will launch in 2027.Maia 200 runs models from OpenAI, Microsoft’s own MAI models and leading open-source models.The chip is deployed in the United States, Europe and Australia and delivers up to 1.7 times as much output per watt as leading graphics processing unit-based systems for AI features built into Teams and Copilot, according to the company.Microsoft said the Maia 300 will perform 40% more AI work using the same amount of electricity as leading systems and more than twice as much as its own previous chip.Energy efficiency has become a central concern for tech companies racing to build data centers, as the electricity demands of AI strain power grids and drive up costs.Each server rack, a cabinet-sized unit in a data center, will hold 96 of the chips, twice as many as before, and handle up to seven times the workload, the company said.The new chip’s computing components will be manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., known as TSMC.In a separate post, Microsoft engineers said a major focus was reducing the power wasted moving data back and forth inside the machines, a growing problem as AI tools handle more complex tasks.The systems are mostly liquid-cooled, but Microsoft said they can also run in older, air-cooled data centers.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads