Microsoft plans to unveil Maia 300 AI chip this fall

Microsoft ↗ 0.52% is preparing to publicly unveil its next-generation Maia 300 AI chip this fall, potentially as soon as September, as the company looks to ramp up its homegrown silicon effort and reduce its dependence on Nvidia ↘ 1.47% hardware.

A New Chapter for Microsoft's Chip Ambitions

The planned announcement was first reported on Monday by The Information, citing people with direct knowledge of the plans. Reuters confirmed the report, noting that Microsoft intends to increase production of the internally designed chip next year in an effort to persuade large cloud customers to adopt it.reuters+1

The Maia 300 would be the third generation of Microsoft's custom AI accelerator line. The original Maia 100, announced in late 2023, was never made widely available to cloud customers. The second generation, the Maia 200, launched in January 2026 and is currently deployed at Microsoft data centers in Iowa, with expansion planned to the Phoenix area. Microsoft has said the Maia 200 powers OpenAI's GPT-5.2 models and Microsoft 365 Copilot workloads.geekwire+2

Overcoming a Rocky Start

The path to the Maia 300 has not been smooth. In mid-2025, The Information reported that the next-generation Maia chip, codenamed Braga, had been delayed by at least six months due to design changes, staffing shortages, and employee turnover. That chip eventually became the Maia 200, which launched in January 2026 using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.'s ↘ 1.20% 3-nanometer technology.cnbc+2

Even as it rolled out the Maia 200, Microsoft signaled it was already designing the Maia 300. Reports from late 2025 suggested that Intel ↘ 1.02% Foundry could manufacture the Maia 300 using its 18A process.techxplore+1

The Broader Silicon Race

The unveiling would come as major cloud providers continue investing in custom chips to complement or replace off-the-shelf hardware from Nvidia. Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. ↘ 2.24% has its Trainium line, while Google's Alphabet Inc. ↘ 3.58% tensor processing units are now in their seventh generation. Microsoft has claimed that the Maia 200 delivers three times the FP4 performance of Amazon's third-generation Trainium chips.geekwire

By pushing the Maia 300 toward broader customer availability, Microsoft would be taking a step its earlier chip generations did not — making custom silicon a product, not just an internal tool.