From GeekWire (Seattle, Redmond, Kirkland), January 26:
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....
....MUCH MORE
Here's MSFT - Deep dive into the Maia 200 architecture
Microsoft is up 1.6% on the news, Nvidia is down 0.6%. I don't know if it's on the news or ennui.
