Microsoft unveiled its Azure Maia 300 chip at the OCP Global Summit in San Jose on October 12, the newest step in its plan to rely less on Nvidia and AMD for AI inference. The company says Maia 300 will join Maia 100 and Maia 200 in multigigawatt deployments beginning next year.

Microsoft claims the chip delivers about 40% more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU-based systems, and that a 96-chip rack offers roughly seven times the rack-scale token throughput of Maia 200. Those are company figures, not independent benchmarks.

Maia 200 already runs production workloads including Microsoft 365 Copilot and OpenAI models. If Maia 300 ships on the stated schedule from 2027, Microsoft says its Maia family will become its primary AI inference system for its own products and services.

Update (October 13): Reuters reports Microsoft plans to deploy potentially more than a million Maia 300 chips next year to back its internal AI services. That scale, if it holds, makes Maia core inference infrastructure rather than a side project, in a year when Microsoft expects capital spending above $175 billion.