Microsoft on Monday announced Maia 200, the second generation of its custom AI chip, claiming it’s the most powerful first-party silicon from any major cloud provider.
The company says Maia 200 delivers three times the performance of Amazon’s latest Trainium chip on certain benchmarks, and exceeds Google’s most recent tensor processing unit (TPU) on others.
The chip is already running workloads at Microsoft’s data center near Des Moines, Iowa. Microsoft says Maia 200 is powering OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 models, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and internal projects from its Superintelligence team. A second deployment at a data center near Phoenix is planned next.
It’s part of the larger trend among cloud giants to build their own custom silicon for AI rather than rely solely on Nvidia. Google has been refining its TPUs for nearly a decade, and Amazon’s Trainium line is now in its third generation, with a fourth already announced.
Microsoft first revealed its custom chip ambitions in late 2023, when it unveiled Maia 100 at its Ignite conference. Despite entering the race late, Microsoft makes the case that its tight integration between chips, AI models, and applications like Copilot gives it an edge.
The company says Maia 200 offers 30% better performance-per-dollar than its current hardware. Maia 200 also builds on the first-generation chip with a more specific focus on inference, the process of running AI models after they’ve been trained.
The chip competition among the cloud giants has intensified as the cost of running AI models becomes a bigger concern. Training a model is a one-time expense, but serving it to millions of users is a big ongoing expense. All three companies are betting that custom chips tuned for their own workloads will be cheaper than buying solely from Nvidia.
Microsoft is also opening the door to outside developers. The company announced a software development kit that will let AI startups and researchers optimize their models for Maia 200. Developers and academics can sign up for an early preview starting today.
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