{"slug": "microsoft-in-talks-with-tsmc-to-produce-custom-chips", "title": "Microsoft in talks with TSMC to produce custom chips", "summary": "Microsoft is in talks with TSMC to manufacture its custom-designed Maia AI accelerators, including the Maia 200 with over 140 billion transistors and 10 petaFLOPS of FP4 performance, as part of a broader push to reduce reliance on Nvidia and AMD. The partnership extends a relationship dating back to 2004, when TSMC made chips for the original Xbox, and comes as TSMC invests hundreds of billions in US manufacturing amid tariff debates.", "body_md": "Via logo.com\n\n# Microsoft in talks with TSMC to produce custom chips\n\nThe cloud giant is deepening its custom silicon ambitions with the world's most advanced chipmaker, part of a broader push to reduce reliance on third-party AI hardware.\n\nMicrosoft is working with TSMC to manufacture custom-designed chips, extending a partnership that stretches back more than two decades to the original Xbox era. The collaboration centers on Microsoft’s push to build its own AI accelerators rather than buying them off the shelf from Nvidia or AMD.\n\n## What Microsoft is building\n\nThe centerpiece of Microsoft’s custom chip effort is the Maia line of AI accelerators. The latest iteration, the Maia 200, packs over 140 billion transistors onto a single chip, manufactured using TSMC’s cutting-edge 3nm process technology.\n\nIn terms of raw capability, the Maia 200 delivers more than 10 petaFLOPS of FP4 performance. That’s 10 quadrillion floating-point operations per second at four-bit precision, a format specifically tuned for AI inference workloads. These are the tasks that power everything from Copilot responses to Azure AI services running behind the scenes for enterprise customers.\n\nNext-generation Maia variants are expected to arrive around 2026, which means Microsoft is already well into the design cycle for chips that won’t see production for months or longer.\n\n## Diversifying the foundry playbook\n\nTSMC isn’t the only foundry in Microsoft’s orbit. In February 2024, the company reportedly struck a deal worth around $15 billion with Intel to manufacture custom chips using Intel’s 18A process technology.\n\n## TSMC’s US expansion and the tariff question\n\nTSMC has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to building manufacturing capacity on US soil. The investment responds to two forces simultaneously: surging demand for AI hardware and political pressure from Washington to bring semiconductor production back onshore.\n\nThe expansion also intersects with ongoing trade policy debates. Discussions around potential US tariff exemptions for chips supplied by TSMC to American companies like Microsoft highlight how tightly intertwined industrial policy and AI strategy have become.\n\nThe Microsoft-TSMC relationship itself predates the AI era entirely. The two companies have collaborated on custom silicon since at least 2004, when TSMC manufactured chips for Microsoft’s Xbox console.\n\n**Disclosure:** This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our\n\n[Editorial Policy](https://cryptobriefing.com/editorial-policy/).", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/microsoft-in-talks-with-tsmc-to-produce-custom-chips", "canonical_source": "https://cryptobriefing.com/microsoft-tsmc-custom-chip-talks/", "published_at": "2026-08-10 13:11:03+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-10 13:14:56.121470+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-chips", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Microsoft", "TSMC", "Maia 200", "Nvidia", "AMD", "Intel"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/microsoft-in-talks-with-tsmc-to-produce-custom-chips", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/microsoft-in-talks-with-tsmc-to-produce-custom-chips.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/microsoft-in-talks-with-tsmc-to-produce-custom-chips.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/microsoft-in-talks-with-tsmc-to-produce-custom-chips.jsonld"}}