By Danny Vena, CPA
Publication Date: 2026-01-27 19:57:00
The software giant is vying for a bigger piece of the AI pie.
There’s no denying that Nvidia’s (NVDA +1.10%) graphics processing units (GPUs) are tops when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) processing. Unfortunately, being the king of the hill means there’s always someone trying to take your crown.
Microsoft (MSFT +2.23%) just announced the debut of a powerful new AI chip, the latest move in the company’s bid to become a greater force in the AI landscape.
Image source: Microsoft.
A chip off the old block
In a blog post released on Monday, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Cloud + AI, introduced Maia 200, the company’s latest chip designed specifically for AI inference. He calls Maia “a breakthrough inference accelerator engineered to dramatically improve the economics of AI token generation.”
The Maia 200 has more high-bandwidth memory, offering three times the performance of Amazon‘s (AMZN +2.62%) third-generation Trainium chip and above that of Alphabet‘s (GOOGL +0.40%) (GOOG +0.42%) seventh-generation Ironwood Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). Guthrie called Maia “the most performant, first-party silicon from any hyperscaler.” The processor provides both performance and bang for the buck, being “tailored for large-scale AI workloads while also delivering efficient performance per dollar.”
Maia also includes a reconfigured memory system designed to prevent bottlenecks when feeding data into the AI model. It’s also Microsoft’s most efficient…
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