The chip, named the Maia 200, is designed to be what Microsoft calls an “AI inference powerhouse” as Microsoft describes, meaning it’s optimized for the compute-intensive work of running AI models in production. All of the cloud giants are turning to their own AI chip designs in part because of the difficulty, and expense, of obtaining the latest and greatest from Nvidia — a supply crunch that shows no signs of abating. But even with its own state-of-the-art, high-performance chip in hand, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company will still be buying chips made by others. That said, Maia 200 will be used by Microsoft’s own so-called Superintelligence team, the AI specialists building the software giant’s own frontier models. “Our Superintelligence team will be the first to use Maia 200 as we develop our frontier AI models.”