❯ Microsoft unveils its third-generation Maia 300 AI chip and plans multi-gigawatt deployments from 2027 as its main inference system

In-house silicon moves to the frontScott Guthrie, who runs Microsoft’s cloud and AI business, announced the third-generation Maia 300 accelerator in an official blog post on October 12. He said that from 2027 the Maia family will be deployed at multi-gigawatt scale and become the primary inference system for Microsoft’s products and services. Inference is the computing a trained model does to answer requests, and Copilot uses it every time it responds.

Ninety-six to a rackMaia 300 uses a multi-chiplet design. Its compute chiplets are made on TSMC’s N2P process, and each accelerator has eight stacks of HBM4 high-bandwidth memory and draws 950 watts. A rack holds 96 accelerators at 167 kilowatts. Microsoft estimates it produces 40% more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU systems and up to seven times the rack-level throughput of Maia 200. These are Microsoft’s own figures.

The last generation already runs CopilotMicrosoft says Maia 200 is in production, serving workloads such as Microsoft Copilot and running OpenAI models, its own MAI models and open-source models across the United States, Europe and Australia. GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Foundry are due to follow by the end of the year. SiliconANGLE notes that Maia 300 matches Nvidia’s Rubin on memory capacity and has about 20% less memory bandwidth.

What it saves is the cost of each answerMicrosoft has built AI features into Copilot, Teams and GitHub, and its inference bill grows with every use. If its own chips do deliver 40% more tokens from the same power, the first place that shows up is the margin on Microsoft’s own products. Production deployment of Maia 300 starts next year, and Microsoft says it will share more at its Ignite conference next month.

▮ SIGNALCloud companies no longer build chips to have a spare option; they build them to carry the main load, and Nvidia’s biggest competitors in inference are its biggest customers.