A new report claims that despite having spent years designing its own AI chips, Microsoft's first in-house silicon offering has been delayed by six months. Furthermore, when it finally does launch in 2026, it will reportedly fall short of the performance of Nvidia's Blackwell chips, according to The Information.
A new report claims Microsoft's chip is taking much longer than expected, which will amplify the gulf in performance to Nvidia Blackwell, making them even less competitive by the time the chips go into production.
The chip, code-named Braga, has reportedly been delayed by at least six months, pushing mass production into next year. According to inside sources cited in the report, the chip is "expected to fall well short of the performance of Nvidia’s flagship Blackwell chip," which came out last year.
In the fast-moving world of AI, it's a huge blow for Microsoft, which wanted to deploy the chip in its data centers this year. According to the report, people from the project blame unanticipated design changes, staffing constraints, and high turnover as the reasons for the delay.
While Nvidia remains the industry leader in the field, Microsoft, as well as Google, Amazon, and beyond, are all working to develop in-house silicon to reduce their reliance on Nvidia. As the report notes, Nvidia seems unperturbed by the efforts, CEO Jensen Huang going so far as to suggests that many rival chip projects would be abandoned by big tech companies, asking "What’s the point of building an ASIC if it’s not going to be better than the one you can buy?”
If the latest reports of Microsoft's chip delay are true, Huang might just be proved right. Per the report, Microsoft has been working on a chip since 2019 and revealed Maia 100 in 2023. The 128-core Arm CPU was expected to show up in data centers in early 2024. Unfortunately, the chip has mostly been used for internal testing rather than real-world usage, and Microsoft sources reportedly claimed the chip isn't being used to power any of Microsoft's AI services. This is largely because the chip, conceived prior to OpenAI's ChatGPT revolution, is designed for image processing, not generative AI and LLM use.
Microsoft is reportedly working on three chips behind the scenes, dubbed Braga, Braga-R, and Clea, targeting data center deployment in 2025, 2026, and 2027, respectively. The delay of the former casts doubt on whether Microsoft will meet this ambitious launch target. The Information reports that all three chips are designed for inference — a separate chip designed for training AI models was reportedly cancelled in early 2024.
One of the aforementioned changes to design was a shift to include new features at the behest of OpenAI, a move that apparently made the chip unstable during simulations and set the project back several months. Microsoft didn't adjust the deadline, despite the setback, and the team was reportedly under so much stress that one-fifth of the people on some teams have reportedly left.
Microsoft allegedly won't have chips to compete with Nvidia's offerings until 2027, the Clea variant of its Maia chip, with the company lagging behind Nvidia massively in the meantime. Naturally, this also doesn't factor in any major leaps Nvidia makes in the meantime.
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