Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) shares are climbing Monday. The company said it will scale up its Azure Maia system to multi-gigawatt deployments. Here’s what you should know.

• Microsoft shares are trending higher. What’s driving MSFT shares up?

Microsoft Rises as Azure Maia 200 Enters Production

Starting in 2027, Microsoft intends to expand its Azure Maia chips to installations measured in multiple gigawatts, positioning Maia as the chief engine for AI inference behind its products and services. Right now, Maia 200 powers live Copilot workloads and supports the MAI team’s development of its upcoming models.

By the end of the year, GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Foundry are slated to run on it as well. The chip handles OpenAI’s models, Microsoft’s MAI models and major open-source families alike.

Installations of Maia 200 are underway in the United States, Europe and Australia. Microsoft claims up to 1.7 times better token output per watt than leading GPU infrastructure for the AI built into Teams, Copilot and Cowork.

Maia 300 Promises More Tokens Per Megawatt Than GPU Systems

Next comes Maia 300, the third chip in the Maia lineup. Microsoft built it for reasoning over long contexts, speedy chat responses and agent tasks that unfold over many steps. Against leading GPU-based systems, Microsoft expects 40% more tokens from each megawatt. A full 96-accelerator Maia 300 rack can deliver up to seven times the rack-scale token throughput of Maia 200. Microsoft will start deploying Maia 300 in production in 2027.

Microsoft optimized the chip for inference above all. Its eight HBM4 memory stacks reach 18.0 TB/s of peak bandwidth on a 950-watt thermal budget. Support for low-precision formats such as enhanced MXFP4 lowers memory and bandwidth requirements, which makes room for larger context windows. Ethernet-based networking with a custom AI transport lets deployments stretch from a single rack to an entire data center.

Microsoft calls Maia a cornerstone of what it dubs Frontier Transformation, a strategy built on an open, multi-model platform spanning chips, systems and agents. More details on strategy, technology adoption trends and customer results will come at Microsoft Ignite 2026 next month in San Francisco.

MSFT Shares Are Rising

MSFT Price Action: Microsoft shares were up 1.33% at $542.16 at the time of publication on Monday. The stock is approaching its 52-week high of $553.72, according to Benzinga Pro.

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