Microsoft's AI Chip Strategy: Collaborating with Nvidia and AMD

Microsoft's AI Chip Strategy: Collaborating with Nvidia and AMD
Microsoft's AI Chip Strategy: Collaborating with Nvidia and AMD 1. In-House Silicon: The Maia 200 Rollout Microsoft’s centerpiece for 2026 is the deployment of its second-generation custom AI chip, Maia 200 . Target Workload: It is an inference-optimized chip built on TSMC’s 3-nanometer process. Integration: It powers major first-party services like Copilot, Microsoft 365, and OpenAI’s GPT-5.2. Performance: Microsoft reports 30% better performance-per-dollar compared to existing cloud alternatives, specifically aiming to lower the high operational costs of large-scale AI. Strategic Goal: Alongside the chip, Microsoft has released a full software development kit (SDK) to help developers bypass Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA software ecosystem. 2. Partnership with AMD Microsoft continues to use AMD as a critical "secondary" supplier and a lever for cost competition. MI300X/MI400 Adoption: Microsoft Azure offers instances powered by AMD’s MI300X chips and is a primary customer for the MI4…