Microsoft Just Took Its Biggest Step Toward Independence From Nvidia Omor Ibne Ehsan Tue, October 13, 2026 at 9:04 AM EDT 5 min read MSFT +1.14% NVDA -1.29% Explore stocks on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Azure Maia 300 sent MSFT up 1% and NVDA down 1%, as Microsoft named it the primary engine for all its AI products.
Evercore ISI estimates Maia covers only 10% of Microsoft's AI chip spend by early 2027, limiting near-term damage to Nvidia.
All Maia performance claims are self-reported and unverified externally, with analyst Patrick Moorhead noting no outside testing has occurred.
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Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) closed at $541.15, up 1.14%. Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) closed at $226.32, down 1.29%. The stocks moved apart after Microsoft revealed Azure Maia 300, its newest in-house AI chip, and said Maia will become the main engine for running its own AI products.
Investors treated the news as a small transfer of value from one company to the other. The money involved is in inference, which is the work of running a trained AI model to answer a user. Training is the work of building the model in the first place, so inference is the bill that repeats forever, while training is the bill you pay to get started.
Microsoft is building its own hardware for the repeating, high-volume bill and will keep leasing Nvidia silicon for training. If you own Microsoft, the question is who keeps the savings as Copilot and Office turn AI into everyday work.
Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president for cloud and AI, wrote: "We will scale our Azure Maia family to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027," making Maia "the primary inference system for Microsoft products and services." Satya Nadella posted on X on October 12, 2026: "Today we are announcing our biggest bet yet on our own silicon."
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Large-scale deployment begins in 2027. Reports put possible deployment at more than a million chips next year, but Microsoft has not confirmed that figure.
Rani Borkar, who runs Azure's hardware systems, described the goal as "basically delivering more intelligence for every watt, every dollar, and every byte of memory."
Microsoft says Maia 300 produces 40% more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU systems. Its 96-chip rack draws about 167 kilowatts, compared with 142 kilowatts for a 72-GPU Nvidia GB300 rack. So each Maia rack uses more power, while Microsoft claims it does more work for each unit of that power.
Maia is reserved for Microsoft's internal use and pays off only by bringing down what it costs Microsoft to serve the Copilot and OpenAI models it already sells, which makes the return smaller than a chip-selling business would offer but much more certain.
Microsoft expects capital spending of more than $175 billion this calendar year. At that size, even a small cut in the cost per token means meaningful savings.
The program is building on itself, too. Nadella said Maia 200 delivers 30% better performance per dollar than the latest hardware already in Microsoft's fleet.
Nvidia carries a market value of $5.46 trillion, compared with Microsoft's $4.02 trillion. Evercore ISI estimates that Maia will account for about 10% of Microsoft's AI chip spending by early 2027.
The bigger risk to Nvidia plays out over years, because inference becomes the larger workload over time and every major cloud company is building chips for it. Nvidia still has training demand that keeps growing, and Microsoft plans to be among the first clouds to roll out Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems.
Every Maia figure comes from Microsoft. Analyst Patrick Moorhead pointed out that "nobody has tested them outside of Microsoft yet."
Maia's own plan has slipped before, and an earlier generation's delay raised questions about later targets. A Microsoft general manager also said the company keeps "a little bit of optionality" because the industry changes fast.
The announcement left out training, leasing Maia to customers, and retiring any existing Nvidia capacity. The chips also depend on an outside foundry's 2-nanometer process, which is in heavy demand.
Maia cuts the cost of products Microsoft already sells in huge volume, and that kind of margin gain would accrue to long-term holders, although the 2027 timeline means the savings are still ahead.
The stock trades at a trailing P/E of 30. Among the companies affected by this announcement, Microsoft has the clearest upside.
The next checkpoint is Microsoft's earnings call on October 28. If management reports Maia deployment progress or better cloud gross margins, the case holds up. If it says nothing on either, the 2027 promise deserves more doubt.
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