Launching today
Microsoft Maia 300
Microsoft’s own AI chip, headed to multi-gigawatts
26 followers
Microsoft’s own AI chip, headed to multi-gigawatts
26 followers
Maia 300 is Microsoft’s next-generation AI inference platform, announced Oct 12, 2026. Per Microsoft, it’s built for long-context reasoning, low-latency conversation, and agents, with 8 HBM4 stacks, TSMC N2P compute chiplets, and 96-accelerator racks. Microsoft claims 40% more tokens per megawatt. Production starts in 2027, and Azure Maia scales to multi-gigawatt deployments, becoming the main inference system for Microsoft’s products.
Maia 300 is Microsoft’s next-generation AI inference platform, announced October 12, 2026. Microsoft also said it will expand Azure Maia to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027.
Problem: Running AI at scale is limited by power and cost, and Microsoft has to serve a lot of models to a lot of products like Copilot and Teams. Microsoft’s answer is to design its own silicon alongside the GPUs it buys.
Solution: Maia 300 is built inference-first. Per Microsoft, it targets long-context reasoning, low-latency conversation and multi-step agent work. Microsoft says it will become the primary AI inference system for its own products and services. Satya Nadella is quoted calling it “our biggest bet yet on our own silicon.”
What Microsoft reports about the design:
Eight HBM4 memory stacks with 18.0 TB/s peak bandwidth, and a 950 W power rating
Compute chiplets on TSMC’s N2P process, with a multi-chiplet design that separates compute, memory control and I/O
Support for low-precision formats such as MXFP4 to cut memory and bandwidth needs
A custom AI transport for scale-up communication across accelerators and racks
One rack holds 96 accelerators in a 167 kW power envelope, with 27.6 TB of HBM
Performance: these are Microsoft’s own claims, with no independent benchmarks. It says Maia 300 delivers 40% more tokens per megawatt. Coverage disagrees on what that is compared against, with some outlets saying the previous Maia and others saying leading GPU-based systems, so I’d check Microsoft’s post. It also expects a Maia 300 rack to reach up to 7x the token throughput of Maia 200 at rack scale.
Timeline:
Maia 200 is already running production workloads in the US, Europe and Australia
Maia 300 begins production deployments in 2027
Multi-gigawatt scale-up of Azure Maia also starts in 2027
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