Catenaa, Monday, October 12, 2026- Microsoft revealed its latest AI chip, Azure Maia 300, as it seeks to reduce its reliance on Nvidia and AMD.
According to Yahoo Finance, Microsoft unveiled the AI chip at the OCP Global Summit 2026 in San Jose on Monday; the Maia 300 will join Microsoft’s Maia 200 and Maia 100 chips in what the company said will be multigigawatt deployments beginning next year.
Yahoo Finance reported Microsoft said that will make its Maia chips the “primary AI inference system for Microsoft products and services.”
Maia 300 provides 40% more tokens per megawatt than “leading GPU-based systems,” a clear swipe at Nvidia, and that a 96-chip rack offers seven times the rack-scale token throughput of Microsoft’s Maia 200, according to Yahoo Finance.
Tokens are a basic unit of measurement in AI systems that can represent parts of words, images, and videos. More tokens per megawatt mean a more efficient AI rack.
Nvidia and AMD stocks fell by more than 1.5% and 3.2%, respectively, after the news report.
Yahoo Finance also reported that Microsoft and fellow hyperscaler peers Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic, either already offer or are working on their own custom chips.
Doing so hedges against overdependence on processors from Nvidia and AMD. Producing their own semiconductors also allows companies to tailor them to their specific needs, according to Yahoo Finance.
That’s a potential problem for Nvidia, which regularly generates upwards of 50% of its quarterly revenue from hyperscalers.
According to Yahoo Finance, the Maia 200 chip currently powers its Microsoft production workloads, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, as well as OpenAI models, Microsoft’s MAI models, and open-source models.
That provides 1.7 times more tokens per watt for AI capabilities in Microsoft’s Teams, Copilot, and Cowork software versus other GPU-based systems, the company said.
Yahoo Finance reported that Amazon and Google are making their proprietary AI processors available to external cloud customers. Amazon is also reportedly considering offering chips for deployment in customers’ own data centers, potentially expanding competition in the AI hardware market.
That doesn’t necessarily mean hyperscalers will stop purchasing Nvidia chips entirely.
Despite growing investment in proprietary processors, major cloud providers may continue purchasing chips from established suppliers such as Nvidia and AMD to support different AI workloads.
