Maia 300: Microsoft's 'Biggest Bet Yet' to Loosen Nvidia
By the TechPulse USA New York desk Microsoft still loves Nvidia. It said so last week, when Satya Nadella shared a stage with Jensen Huang to launch a new line of Windows PCs built on Nvidia chips. It said so again in July, when Nadella promised Microsoft would be among the first cloud providers to deploy systems based on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin silicon. And then, this morning, Nadella announced the chip meant to need Nvidia a whole lot less. "Today we are announcing our biggest bet yet on our own silicon," Nadella wrote on X, unveiling the Maia 300 — the third generation of Microsoft's custom AI chip. "Starting next calendar year, we will scale our Maia family to multi-gigawatt deployments, making it the primary inference system for our own product and services." That is not the language of a side project. "Primary inference system" means the silicon that will actually answer your Copilot queries, run your Teams summaries, and grin...