Microsoft unveils Maia 300 AI chip, plans expanded rollout from 2027

Microsoft on Monday unveiled its third-generation Maia AI accelerator, with plans to expand deployment of its own chips starting in 2027 and make them the primary inference system for its products and services.

The company plans to scale its Azure Maia family to multi-gigawatt deployments, Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Cloud and AI, said in a blog post.

Inference is the process through which trained artificial intelligence models generate responses to requests.

Microsoft expects Maia 300 to deliver 40% more tokens per megawatt than leading graphics processing unit-based systems. A configuration containing 96 accelerators can deliver up to seven times the rack-level token throughput of Maia 200, according to the company.

Production deployments of Maia 300 will begin in 2027.

Its predecessor, Maia 200, already supports production workloads including Microsoft Copilot, with GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Foundry set to follow by year-end.

The new system is designed for workloads including long-context reasoning, time-sensitive conversations and multistep AI agent tasks, Microsoft said.