Microsoft Scales Maia AI Chips to Gigawatt Levels by 2027: Self-Silicon Powers Copilot with 1.7x Efficiency

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Oct 12, 2026

Microsoft

Microsoft plans to deploy its Azure Maia AI chips at multi-gigawatt scale starting in 2027. They'll become the company's main inference system across its products, executive Scott Guthrie writes. Maia 200 already runs Microsoft Copilot in the US, Europe, and Australia. GitHub Copilot and Foundry follow by year's end. CEO Satya Nadella calls it "our biggest bet yet on our own silicon." The chip handles OpenAI, MAI, and open-source models, and Microsoft says it pushes up to 1.7 times more tokens per watt than leading GPUs in Teams.

Each Maia 300 chip packs eight HBM4 memory stacks totaling 288 GB with 18 TB/s of bandwidth. It's rated at 950 watts. | Image: Microsoft

Its successor, Maia 300, ships in 2027 and targets long inputs, fast chats, and agentic tasks. Microsoft claims 40 percent more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU systems. A 96-chip rack should produce up to seven times the tokens of a Maia 200 rack. The technical report covers the details, with more coming in November at Ignite 2026.