Over the years, Intel has been committed to building a competitive chip foundry business. According to the latest industry news, Microsoft has selected Intel to manufacture next-generation AI accelerator chips to support its large-scale data center expansion plan, fully reflecting Intel's ambition to compete for the rapidly growing AI hardware market share.
According to SemiAccurate, Microsoft will use Intel to produce its Maia 3 AI chip. This machine learning accelerator, codenamed "Griffin", will become a key part of Microsoft's self-developed data center. Maia 3 is Microsoft's upgraded product from the Maia series and is intended to provide customers with an alternative to third-party AI chips. Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott confirmed in a previous interview that the company will continue to develop AI chips in the future, although the current AI cloud workload still relies on Nvidia GPU technology.
According to the plan, if the Maia 3 project progresses smoothly, Microsoft's future generations of AI chips are expected to continue to be manufactured by Intel. Maia 3 uses Intel's 18A process. It is reported that this process has previously faced challenges due to low yield and quality issues. Now Intel has announced that 18A is ready for customer projects and has become North America's first advanced sub-2nm process.
Maia 3 chips may use 18A or the more advanced 18A-P process. It is reported that the 18A second-generation process can optimize performance and energy efficiency, improve threshold voltage and leakage performance. Microsoft's future new Maia chips are even expected to be further upgraded to 18A-PT or 14A processes.
The 18A-PT node is specially designed for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing customers, supporting higher packaging scalability and integration levels, helping to improve the performance of generative AI and chatbots.
Currently, there are frequent rumors and cooperation related to Intel foundry. In addition to Microsoft's Maia 3 plan, market news said that Intel may also OEM x86 chips for AMD, and the client PC processor product line is progressing smoothly.