Nadella says Microsoft will not stop buying AI chips from Nvidia and AMD, even after launching its own chips.

Microsoft this week deployed its first crop of homegrown AI chips in one of its data centers, with plans to roll out more in the coming months, it says.

The chip, called the Maia 200, is designed to be what Microsoft calls an “AI inference powerhouse,” meaning it’s optimized for the compute-intensive work of running AI models in production. The company released some impressive processing speed specs for Maia, saying it outperforms Amazon’s latest Trainium chips and Google’s latest Tensor Processing Units (TPU).

The cloud giants are all turning to their own AI chip designs, in part because of the difficulty and cost of getting the latest and greatest from Nvidia — a supply crunch that shows no signs of abating.

But even with a modern, high-performance chip, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company would still buy chips made by others.

“We have a great partnership with Nvidia, and with AMD. They innovate. We innovate,” he explained. “I think a lot of people just talk about who’s in front. Just remember, you have to be in front all the time.”

“Just because we can vertically integrate doesn’t mean we only integrate vertically,” he added, which means building our own systems from top to bottom, without using products from other vendors.

However, the Maia 200 will be used by Microsoft’s so-called Super Intelligence Team, AI specialists who build frontier models for the software giant. That’s according to Mustafa Soliman, the former co-founder of Google DeepMind who now leads the team. Microsoft is working on its own models, perhaps one day, to reduce its reliance on OpenAI, Anthropic, and other model makers.

The company says the Maia 200 chip will also support OpenAI models running on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. But by all accounts, securing access to the most advanced AI hardware remains a challenge for everyone, including customers and internal teams alike.

So, in a post on X, Solomon clearly enjoyed sharing the news that his team took first place. “It’s a great day,” he wrote when the slide was released. “Our superintelligence team will be the first to use the Maia 200 as we advance our frontier AI models.”