Microsoft has introduced the Maia 200, its latest in-house artificial intelligence chip, along with new software tools aimed at challenging Nvidia's dominance in the AI hardware and developer ecosystem. The Maia 200, already operational in select data centers, is designed for high-performance inference tasks and reportedly surpasses competing chips from Amazon and Google in both speed and cost-efficiency. Microsoft is also launching open-source programming tools and a development kit to help external developers optimize their models for the new chip. This move is part of a broader industry trend among major cloud providers to develop custom AI chips, seeking greater control over performance and costs as demand for large-scale AI systems grows.