Microsoft Escalates AI Arms Race With Next Gen Chips

by | Jan 26, 2026 | General

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) unveiled an upgraded version of its homegrown AI chip on Monday, pairing it with new developer tools to directly compete with Nvidia Corp.’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) strongest moat.

Microsoft built Maia 200 as an inference-focused accelerator on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd.’s (NYSE:TSM) 3nm process with native FP8 (8-bit Floating Point)/FP4 tensor cores.

The chip pairs a redesigned memory system, 216GB of HBM3E (High Bandwidth Memory 3 Extended) delivering 7 TB/s and 272MB of on-chip Static Random-Access Memory (SRAM).

Microsoft said Maia 200 delivers three times the FP4 performance of Amazon.com, Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) third-generation Trainium and FP8 performance above Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), while improving performance per dollar by 30% versus the latest hardware in its fleet.

Microsoft placed Maia 200 inside its heterogeneous AI infrastructure to serve multiple models, including OpenAI’s latest GPT-5.2 models, and to support Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

The Microsoft Superintelligence team will use Maia 200 for synthetic data generation and reinforcement learning to improve next-generation in-house models.

Microsoft deployed Maia 200 in its U.S. Central datacenter region near Des Moines, Iowa, and plans to bring it next to the U.S. West 3 region near Phoenix, Arizona, with additional regions to follow.

Microsoft said Maia 200 integrates seamlessly with Azure and will be supported by a preview of the Maia SDK, a full developer toolkit designed to help build and optimize models for the chip.

The company said the SDK includes PyTorch integration, a Triton compiler, optimized kernel libraries, and access to Maia’s low-level programming language, giving developers both fine-grained control and the ability to easily port models across different hardware accelerators.

MSFT Price Action: Microsoft shares were up 1.67% at $473.72 at the time of publication on Monday, according to Benzinga Pro data.

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