Techcrunch
Microsoft has announced the Maia 200, a new AI chip designed for efficient and high-speed AI inference. This successor to the Maia 100 boasts over 100 billion transistors and significantly improved performance, aiming to reduce operational costs and power consumption for AI businesses.
AI 生成摘要
微軟發布了新款AI晶片Maia 200，專為高效、高速的AI推理而設計。這款Maia 100的後繼產品擁有超過1000億個電晶體，效能大幅提升，旨在降低AI企業的營運成本和功耗。
Latest
AI
Amazon
Apps
Biotech & Health
Climate
Cloud Computing
Commerce
Crypto
Enterprise
EVs
Fintech
Fundraising
Gadgets
Gaming
Government & Policy
Hardware
Layoffs
Media & Entertainment
Meta
Microsoft
Privacy
Robotics
Security
Social
Space
Startups
TikTok
Transportation
Venture
Staff
Events
Startup Battlefield
StrictlyVC
Newsletters
Podcasts
Videos
Partner Content
TechCrunch Brand Studio
Crunchboard
Contact Us
Microsoft has announced the launch of its latest chip, the Maia 200, which the company describes as a silicon workhorse designed for scaling AI inference.
The 200, which follows the company’s Maia 100 released in 2023, has been technically outfitted to run powerful AI models at faster speeds and with more efficiency, the company has said. Maia comes equipped with over 100 billion transistors, delivering over 10 petaflops in 4-bit precision and approximately 5 petaflops of 8-bit performance—a substantial increase over its predecessor.
Inference refers to the computing process of running a model, in contrast with the compute required to train it. As AI companies mature, inference costs have become an increasingly important part of their overall operating cost, leading to renewed interest in ways to optimize the process.
Microsoft is hoping that the Maia 200 can be part of that optimization, making AI businesses run with less disruption and lower power use. “In practical terms, one Maia 200 node can effortlessly run today’s largest models, with plenty of headroom for even bigger models in the future,” the company said.
Microsoft’s new chip is also part of a growing trend of tech giants turning to self-designed chips as a way to lessen their dependence on NVIDIA, whose cutting-edge GPUs have become increasingly pivotal to AI companies’ success. Google, for instance, has its TPU, the tensor processing units—which aren’t sold as chips but as compute power made accessible through its cloud. Then there’s Amazon Trainium, the e-commerce giant’s own AI accelerator chip, which just launched its latest version, the Trainium3, in December. In each case, the TPUs can be used to offload some of the compute that would otherwise be assigned to NVIDIA GPUs, lessening the overall hardware cost.
With Maia, Microsoft is positioning itself to compete with those alternatives. In its press release Monday, the company noted that Maia delivers 3x the FP4 performance of third generation Amazon Trainium chips, and FP8 performance above Google’s seventh generation TPU.
Microsoft says that Maia is already hard at work fueling the company’s AI models from its Superintelligence team. It has also been supporting the operations of Copilot, its chatbot. As of Monday, the company said it has invited a variety of parties — including developers, academics, and frontier AI labs — to use its Maia 200 software development kit in their workloads.
Topics
Senior Writer, TechCrunch
Tickets are live at the lowest rates of the year. Save up to $680 on your pass — and if you’re among the first 500 registrants, score a +1 pass at 50% off.Meet investors. Discover your next portfolio company. Hear from 250+ tech leaders, dive into 200+ sessions, and explore 300+ startups building what’s next. Don’t miss these one-time savings.
TikTok users freak out over app’s ‘immigration status’ collection — here’s what it means
Researchers say Russian government hackers were behind attempted Poland power outage
Microsoft gave FBI a set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects’ laptops: Reports
Capital One acquires Brex for a steep discount to its peak valuation, but early believers are laughing all the way to the bank
Anthropic’s CEO stuns Davos with Nvidia criticism
Humans&, a ‘human-centric’ AI startup founded by Anthropic, xAI, Google alums, raised $480M seed round
SpaceX didn’t properly inspect crane before collapse at Starbase, OSHA says
© 2025 TechCrunch Media LLC.