Microsoft drops its first custom AI chips
Microsoft just unveiled its first in-house silicon at Ignite: the Azure Maia 100 AI accelerator and the 128-core Azure Cobalt 100 CPU. Designed to power Azure workloads, Copilot, and OpenAI’s models, Maia packs 105 billion transistors on a 5nm node. Why it matters: Microsoft is finally joining Google and AWS with custom chips, giving it tighter control over skyrocketing AI infrastructure costs.