By Reuters
Publication Date: 2026-01-26 16:02:00
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 26 (Reuters) – Microsoft on Monday unveiled the second generation of its in-house artificial intelligence chip, along with software tools that take aim at one of Nvidia‘s biggest competitive advantages with developers.
The new “Maia 200” chip comes online this week in a data center in Iowa, with plans for a second location in Arizona, Microsoft said. It is the second generation of an AI chip called Maia that Microsoft introduced in 2023.
The Maia 200 comes as major cloud computing firms such as Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google and Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services – some of Nvidia’s biggest customers – are producing their own chips that increasingly compete with Nvidia.
Google, in particular, has garnered interest from major Nvidia customers such as Meta Platforms, which is working closely with Google to close one of the biggest software gaps between Google and Nvidia’s AI chip offerings.
For its part, Microsoft said that along with the new Maia chip, it will be offering a package of software tools to program it. That includes Triton, an open-source software tool with major contributions from ChatGPT creator OpenAI that takes on the same tasks as Cuda, the Nvidia software that many Wall Street analysts say is Nvidia’s biggest competitive advantage.
Like Nvidia’s forthcoming flagship “Vera Rubin” chips introduced earlier this month, Microsoft’s Maia 200 is made by Taiwan…
