Microsoft unveils its own Maia 100 and Cobalt 100 chips

At Ignite, Microsoft announced two chips designed in its own silicon lab: the Azure Maia 100 AI Accelerator and the Azure Cobalt 100 CPU. Maia 100 was an AI accelerator for running cloud training and inference for workloads such as OpenAI's models, Bing, GitHub Copilot, and ChatGPT, with 105 billion transistors — among the largest chips on a 5nm process. Microsoft said it had shared the Maia 100 design with OpenAI to confirm it was optimized for large language model work. Cobalt 100 was a 128-core, 64-bit Arm CPU that Microsoft said delivered 40% better performance than existing Azure Arm chips. Both were fabricated at TSMC and were to reach Microsoft's data centers in the first part of the following year. With this, Microsoft joined Google's TPUs and Amazon's Trainium in building its own silicon to reduce dependence on NVIDIA.