Microsoft unveils Azure Maia 300, plans multi-gigawatt AI inference scale-up from 2027
Microsoft introduced Maia 300, the third generation of its in-house AI accelerator, and said it will scale the Azure Maia family to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027 as its primary inference system.
Photo: Jiaqian AirplaneFan / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 (Building 92, Microsoft Redmond Campus). Microsoft logo via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Microsoft on October 12 introduced Azure Maia 300, the third generation of its in-house AI accelerator family, and said it will scale the Azure Maia family to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027, making Maia the primary inference system across its products and services, Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Cloud + AI, wrote on the Official Microsoft Blog.
Guthrie described Maia 300 as a complete intelligent system designed for long-context reasoning, latency-sensitive conversational experiences and sustained, multi-step agentic tasks. By improving efficiency across the system, Microsoft expects Maia 300 to deliver 40% more tokens per megawatt compared with leading GPU-based systems. In a full 96-accelerator configuration, the company said, Maia 300 delivers up to 7x the rack-scale token throughput of Maia 200.
Maia 300 follows Maia 200, which Microsoft said is already serving production workloads including Microsoft Copilot and supporting the MAI team, with GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Foundry to follow by the end of 2026. Across those workloads, Maia 200 runs OpenAI models, Microsoft's own MAI models and leading open-source model families. Maia 200 is deploying across the United States, Europe and Australia, and Microsoft said it is delivering up to 1.7x more tokens per watt for built-in AI capabilities in Teams, Copilot and Cowork experiences compared with leading GPU infrastructure.
Microsoft said Maia 300 will begin production deployments in 2027 and pointed readers to a technical paper for architectural detail. The company said it will share more on its strategy at Microsoft Ignite 2026.