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.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
October 13-15, 2026
Source link
#Microsoft #announces #powerful #chip #inference #TechCrunch



![New ‘Gundam Wing’ ‘Visual Project’ in the Works
By the time Cartoon Network syndicated the 1995 anime series Mobile Suit Gundam Wing in the United States in the summer of 2000, the Gundam franchise was already hugely popular in Japan. Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, however, was a watershed moment for the franchise in the West, introducing an entire generation of anime fans to Gundam specifically but also the mecha anime genre in general. It’s understandably something of a big deal to a lot of Western anime fans. But despite its massive influence, Gundam Wing had a relatively short run: just 49 episodes and four original video animations. There was a spate of manga adaptations in the ’90s, too, and a serial novel called Frozen Teardrop that ran from 2010 to 2015 in Gundam Ace, but for the most part, Gundam Wing has been content to let its legacy speak for itself. Until now, that is. During the spring 2026 Gundam Conference (via Comic Book), Bandai Namco announced that a new Gundam Wing “visual project” is in the works. When pressed for more details, Bandai Namco Filmworks producer Naohiro Ogata said, “I can’t say what the format is yet, but it is definitely something long.” The announcement on the official Gundam website is similarly light on details, but it’s still hugely exciting. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX8NQa1WWic[/embed] Gundam Wing follows five teenage mech pilots sent to Earth to free their home space colonies from the oppression of the United Earth Sphere Alliance. It’s set in an alternate timeline from the original Mobile Suit Gundam series, which first aired in Japan in 1979. Alternate timelines are pretty common in the world of Gundam, so it’s possible that the new project could go that route, though it’d be hard to sell as a Wing series specifically rather than a separate Gundam series.
The new project could also simply pick up where the anime left off or follow the plot of Frozen Teardrop, which was essentially a sequel story. It could even be a prequel, for all we know. With so little information revealed, the possibilities are endless about what this new Gundam Wing could be. That’s not going to stop us from being unreasonably excited about it, though. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Gundam #Wing #Visual #Project #WorksGundam,Gundam Wing New ‘Gundam Wing’ ‘Visual Project’ in the Works
By the time Cartoon Network syndicated the 1995 anime series Mobile Suit Gundam Wing in the United States in the summer of 2000, the Gundam franchise was already hugely popular in Japan. Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, however, was a watershed moment for the franchise in the West, introducing an entire generation of anime fans to Gundam specifically but also the mecha anime genre in general. It’s understandably something of a big deal to a lot of Western anime fans. But despite its massive influence, Gundam Wing had a relatively short run: just 49 episodes and four original video animations. There was a spate of manga adaptations in the ’90s, too, and a serial novel called Frozen Teardrop that ran from 2010 to 2015 in Gundam Ace, but for the most part, Gundam Wing has been content to let its legacy speak for itself. Until now, that is. During the spring 2026 Gundam Conference (via Comic Book), Bandai Namco announced that a new Gundam Wing “visual project” is in the works. When pressed for more details, Bandai Namco Filmworks producer Naohiro Ogata said, “I can’t say what the format is yet, but it is definitely something long.” The announcement on the official Gundam website is similarly light on details, but it’s still hugely exciting. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX8NQa1WWic[/embed] Gundam Wing follows five teenage mech pilots sent to Earth to free their home space colonies from the oppression of the United Earth Sphere Alliance. It’s set in an alternate timeline from the original Mobile Suit Gundam series, which first aired in Japan in 1979. Alternate timelines are pretty common in the world of Gundam, so it’s possible that the new project could go that route, though it’d be hard to sell as a Wing series specifically rather than a separate Gundam series.
The new project could also simply pick up where the anime left off or follow the plot of Frozen Teardrop, which was essentially a sequel story. It could even be a prequel, for all we know. With so little information revealed, the possibilities are endless about what this new Gundam Wing could be. That’s not going to stop us from being unreasonably excited about it, though. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Gundam #Wing #Visual #Project #WorksGundam,Gundam Wing](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/05/Mobile-Suit-Gundam-Wing-1280x853.jpg)
Post Comment