Microsoft is preparing to unveil its Maia 300 chip. The unveiling is expected this fall, possibly as early as next month. The company is negotiating with TSMC for production capacity for over 300,000 units, with delivery scheduled for 2027.
The Information reported this on Monday, citing sources with direct knowledge of the plans. Microsoft wants to significantly scale up production and convince major players like Anthropic to use the chip.
The first Maia chip was released in November 2023. Since then, Microsoft has fallen behind competitors in scaling up its own silicon, while seeking to reduce its reliance on Nvidia’s expensive processors.
Maia 300 was already on the roadmap
Andrew Wall, General Manager of Azure Maia, told Techzine that Maia 300 is expected sometime in 2027. However, he expects the Maia 200 to remain in use for another four to five years. The Maia 200 is manufactured using TSMC’s 3nm process and contains more than 140 billion transistors. The chip delivers over 10 petaFLOPS in 4-bit precision within a power budget of 750 watts, and features 216GB of HBM3e memory and 272MB of on-chip SRAM. Microsoft explicitly designed the accelerator for inference, not training.
Tip: Microsoft Azure Maia executive predicts a complex future for AI chips