Microsoft’s AI chip project shows revival signs, plans Maia 300 release

Microsoft’s custom AI chip ambitions are back on track. The company’s Maia accelerator program, which hit turbulence with design changes and staffing problems, is now producing real hardware and eyeing an expanded lineup that could reshape how Azure competes for AI workloads. The Maia 200 inference chip, built on TSMC’s 3nm process, has already begun deploying in Microsoft data centers in Iowa and Arizona. And the company is already designing its successor, the Maia 300, positioning the series as a genuine alternative to Nvidia’s dominance in AI compute. What Maia 200 actually brings to the table The Maia 200 ships with 216GB of HBM3e memory and native support for FP8 and FP4 precision formats. Microsoft claims the chip delivers three times the FP4 performance of Amazon’s Trainium3. It also says FP8 performance exceeds what Google’s TPUv7 can do. Microsoft says the Maia 200 offers roughly 30% better performance-per-dollar compared to the previous generation of Azure fleet silicon. The chip is already powering internal applications. Microsoft 365 Copilot and OpenAI’s models are running on Maia 200 hardware in those Iowa and Arizona deployments. A rocky road to revival The Maia progr...