Microsoft prepares to deploy its Maia 300 AI chips in Azure data centers

Microsoft wants to run more of its AI on chips it designed itself. On October 12, 2026, the company unveiled the Azure Maia 300, its third-generation custom AI inference chip. The plan is to deploy it at scale in Azure data centers beginning in 2027. That puts Microsoft on a path toward owning more of the hardware behind Copilot. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella isn’t underselling it. “Our biggest bet yet on our own silicon.” What the Maia 300 is built to do The Maia 300 is built for inference workloads such as conversational AI and long-context reasoning, where a model has to digest large amounts of text before responding. Under the hood, the chip uses a chiplet architecture built on TSMC’s N2P process node. The Maia 300 is reported to deliver 40% more tokens per megawatt than current leading GPU solutions and provides up to 7x the throughput of its predecessor, the Maia 200. Where Maia fits in Microsoft’s lineup The Maia 200 is already operational in data centers across the US, Europe, and Australia, supporting Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot. The Maia 300 is meant to go further. Microsoft aims for it to serve as the core inference system for Copilot experiences, GitHub Copil...