Microsoft Commits Maia to Multi-Gigawatt Inference, and Its Efficiency Metric Draws Questions

Microsoft will scale its Maia accelerator family to multi-gigawatt deployments from 2027, making it the primary inference system for its own products. Maia 300 collapses scale-up and scale-out onto one Ethernet fabric and moves KV state between prefill and decode workers without leaving it. Practitioners have questioned the tokens-per-watt claim that leads the announcement.