Microsoft Unveils Maia 300, Its Third Custom AI Chip, With Deployments Possibly Topping One Million Next Year

What happened

Microsoft introduced the Azure Maia 300 on October 12 at the OCP Global Summit in San Jose. In an official blog post, cloud and AI chief Scott Guthrie wrote that Microsoft will scale the Azure Maia family to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027, making it the primary AI inference system for Microsoft products and services. CEO Satya Nadella called it the company's biggest bet yet on its own silicon in a post on X.

Reuters reported that Microsoft plans to deploy Maia 300 next year, potentially in quantities above one million chips. The previous Maia 200, introduced in January, already runs Microsoft's in-house models as well as OpenAI models delivered on Azure. Microsoft said Maia 200 is deploying across the US, Europe and Australia, with GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Foundry set to move onto it by the end of the year.

Technically, Reuters reported that Maia 300's central processor is built from chiplets, with key computing functions on TSMC's 2-nanometer process and other chiplets on cheaper 3-nanometer technology handling tasks such as data movement. Microsoft said the chip is designed for long-context reasoning, latency-sensitive conversational experiences and multi-step agentic tasks.

Key facts

1. Deployment scale: Reuters reported that Microsoft plans to deploy more than one million Maia 300 chips next year; Microsoft said the Maia family reaches multi-gigawatt deployments from 2027.
2. Efficiency claims: Microsoft said Maia 300 delivers about 40% more useful computing per megawatt than leading GPU-based systems, which it did not name; a 96-chip rack delivers up to seven times the token throughput of a Maia 200 rack.
3. Rack power: A Maia 300 rack holds 96 chips and draws about 167 kilowatts, versus about 142 kilowatts for Nvidia's latest GB300 racks with 72 GPUs, according to Reuters.
4. Manufacturing: The chips are designed by Microsoft and made by TSMC; unlike Google and Amazon, Microsoft does not rent Maia chips to outside customers, according to GeekWire.