TLDR
- Microsoft stock rose 1% to $540.18 on Monday after the company unveiled its Maia 300 AI chip.
- Microsoft plans to deploy potentially more than 1 million Maia 300 chips next year.
- The company says Maia 300 delivers about 40% more computing per megawatt than leading GPU-based systems.
- Each Maia 300 rack holds 96 chips and uses about 167 kilowatts of power.
- Analysts expect Azure revenue to grow 43% in fiscal 2027, up from 41% in 2026.
Microsoft (MSFT) stock rose 1% to $540.18 on Monday. The move came after the company announced the Maia 300, the third generation of its custom AI chip.
The stock has gained 11% in 2026. That trails the S&P 500 by a few percentage points, according to Barron’s.
Microsoft says it plans to deploy potentially more than 1 million Maia 300 chips next year. The chips will back the company’s internal AI services.
The Maia 300 is built to handle AI tasks like coding and carrying out complex business work for users. Its predecessor already runs Microsoft’s in-house AI models. It also runs OpenAI models delivered on Azure.
Microsoft took a different path than Nvidia in designing the chip. Nvidia’s accelerators use one large computing chip surrounded by high-bandwidth memory chips.
How the Chip Is Built
The Maia 300’s main processor is made of “chiplets,” which are specialized chips bonded together. Key computing functions use 2-nanometer technology from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing.
Other chiplets use cheaper 3-nanometer technology. These handle jobs like moving data off the processor and around the system.
The chips go into racks of 96 units that use about 167 kilowatts of power. Nvidia’s latest GB300 racks hold 72 GPUs and use 142 kilowatts.
Microsoft says Maia 300 gets about 40% more useful computing done per megawatt than leading GPU-based systems. It did not name the systems it used for the comparison.
“It’s basically delivering more intelligence for every watt, every dollar, and every byte of memory by optimizing across the entire system,” said Rani Borkar, president of Azure hardware systems and infrastructure at Microsoft.
Where It Fits in the AI Race
Microsoft called Maia “the primary AI inference system for Microsoft products and services” in a blog post. Inference means using trained models to solve problems and power AI agents.
Rivals are also building their own chips. Amazon has Trainium and Inferentia, and Google is on its eighth generation of TPUs. Meta and OpenAI have only recently started.
Other chip stocks moved on Monday. AMD fell 3%, Amazon slipped 0.4% and Alphabet gained 0.5%.
The company plans “multi-gigawatt deployments” of Maia 300 starting next year. Microsoft expects to spend more than $175 billion in capital expenditures this calendar year.
FactSet analysts expect Azure revenue to grow 43% in fiscal 2027, which ends next June. Barron’s reports Microsoft is investing a projected $189 billion this fiscal year.
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