Opinion: How Microsoft’s new chip for AI could disrupt big tech — especially Nvidia, AMD and Intel

Microsoft earlier this week took the wraps off one of the more important reveals in the chip market in a long time. Microsoft MSFT now has both a custom-designed AI processing chip and a custom Arm-based CPU to add its growing stable of products to help it vertically integrate its services and solutions.

The star of the show is the new Azure Maia 100 AI accelerator chip. This chip is built for both training and inference (creating the models and then utilizing them for work) and has been collaborated on with OpenAI, the AI…