Microsoft ramps up Maia AI chip production and pitches Anthropic as customer
Microsoft $MSFT is in talks with TSMC $TSM to secure manufacturing capacity for more than 300,000 units of its next-gen Maia 300 AI chip for delivery in 2027. Microsoft is pitching Anthropic as a customer, even as Anthropic builds its own in-house chip team for Claude models.
Microsoft $MSFT is in talks with TSMC $TSM to secure manufacturing capacity for more than 300,000 units of its next-generation Maia 300 AI chip, targeting delivery in 2027. The company plans to unveil the chip this fall and is working to persuade major cloud customers, including Anthropic, to adopt Maia as an alternative to relying on Nvidia $NVDA hardware. The push comes with a complication: Anthropic has confirmed it is forming its own internal semiconductor team to design custom chips for its Claude models, making the AI company simultaneously a potential Maia customer and an emerging long-term competitor in custom silicon. Anthropic already has deals in place for 1 million Amazon Trainium chips and Google Tensor Processing Unit accelerators, illustrating how crowded the market for AI compute alternatives to Nvidia has become. Microsoft courting Anthropic as a customer while Anthropic simultaneously builds competing in-house silicon shows how thin the line has become between being an AI cloud customer and a competitor in the compute supply chain. Per The Information, Bloomberg.