AI Inference

Microsoft is making its biggest push yet to run its own AI services on its own silicon. The company said Monday that its newest in-house accelerator, the Maia 300, will start rolling out next year, and that it expects to install its Maia chips at multiple-gigawatt scale across its data centers. The plan would make Maia the primary inference system behind Microsoft products — the hardware that answers every Copilot prompt, summarizes every Teams meeting, and generates every research response.

Microsoft and Nvidia took the stage together in San Francisco on October 7 to unveil the Surface Laptop Ultra, a premium 15-inch Windows laptop powered by Nvidia's RTX Spark — the chipmaker's first Arm-based processor built for Windows PCs. The machine starts at $2,599 and ships October 16, with a companion $5,999 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box mini PC arriving in November.

Nvidia plans to take a stake in d-Matrix, a Santa Clara startup that designs chips for AI inference, The Information reported on October 8. The investment, whose size and valuation were not disclosed, is part of a broader Nvidia strategy to make its technology interoperable with rival silicon rather than fighting every inference workload alone.