Microsoft in Talks to Supply Anthropic With Its In-House AI Chip 'Maia'

\r\n
\r\n[The Financial News] Microsoft (MS) is reportedly in talks to supply the generative AI startup Anthropic with its in-house AI-specific semiconductors.
Attention is on whether MS, which has lagged behind rivals such as Amazon and Google in the race to supply its own AI chips, can use this deal to turn things around.
On the 21st local time, CNBC reported, citing sources, that MS is negotiating with Anthropic to supply its in-house AI chip, Maia. The source, who asked to remain anonymous, added, "No final agreement has been signed yet."
MS unveiled its second-generation AI chip, Maia 200, in January, but it has not yet been officially offered to external customers through its cloud platform, Microsoft Azure. MS has said that Maia 200 will power OpenAI's latest GPT-5.2 model, and Satya Nadella, CEO of MS, explained during an earnings call in April that "Maia 200 delivers more than 30% better token processing efficiency per dollar than existing equipment" and is currently running in data centers in Arizona and the State of Iowa.
As the popularity of the chatbot Claude and the AI-based coding tool Claude Code has surged, Anthropic is said to be facing a severe shortage of computing infrastructure. Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, also said at an event earlier this month, "We are struggling to secure computing capacity."
Reflecting that need, documents recently released by Elon Musk's space company SpaceX showed that Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX $125 million a month through May 2029 to secure computing power.
Until now, Anthropic has relied heavily on NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs), but it is now turning to the in-house chips of big tech companies to ease the burden of high costs and supply shortages. In April, it signed a massive 10-year, $10 billion deal to adopt AWS Trainium, Amazon Web Services' in-house AI chip, and in October last year it also announced plans to use Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU).
If the talks succeed, the two companies' AI Alliance is expected to become even stronger. In November, MS decided to invest $5 billion in Anthropic, and Anthropic also committed to spending $30 billion on MS's Azure cloud services.
Industry observers say that if Anthropic adopts MS's in-house chip after those of Amazon and Google, it would help the company secure a more stable and diversified AI infrastructure without becoming dependent on any single cloud provider.
\r\n
jjyoon@fnnews.com Yoon Jae-jun Reporter