Microsoft’s latest chip points to a future where laptops and phones aren’t held hostage by AI inflation

Just don't expect it to happen overnight

04 Feb 2026, 13:49 · TechRadar

Opinion By Jeremy Laird published 4 February 2026

(Image credit: Microsoft)

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Will Microsoft's new AI chip save us all from the AI boom, memory chips worth their weight in gold and, pretty soon, spiraling prices for everything from laptops to phones? Well, no, obviously not. Certainly not on its own. But it might just signal how we do eventually get out of this ridiculous mess.

The big news is that Microsoft has announced Maia 200, its latest in-house chip for running AI models. And it looks potentially very impressive. It's a massive 140 billion-transistor monster that, by at least some metrics, has the edge on even Nvidia's latest Blackwell-generation AI GPUs.

Let's be clear: Maia 200 is not going to single-handedly solve the ongoing memory supply crisis or usurp Nvidia's dominant GPUs. It's not going to prevent PC – and probably phone – prices from going up this year as a consequence of the AI industry's insatiable demand for GPUs and memory chips and SSDs. Heck, Maia 200 isn't even for sale to third parties.

But what it does do is signal a possible alternative future in which consumer devices like PCs, laptops and phones can be, well, consumer devices. In other words, one in which their fate, and more importantly pricing, is disconnected from whatever craziness is going on in the AI industry.

A shift away

It seems inevitable, then, that ASICs will eventually replace GPUs for at least running AI models.

Long story short, what Maia 200 does is signal a shift away from using somewhat general-purpose GPUs for running AI in favour of ASICs or Application Specific Integrated Circuits. ASICs are basically computer chips built to do just one very specific task really efficiently. That typically makes them both far more performant and far more cost effective. The obvious example here, handily, also involves GPUs and that's cryptocurrency mining.

For a time, that too was done on GPUs originally intended for processing graphics. And that too distorted the price of graphics cards. What's happening with AI, of course, is on a whole different level. It's going well beyond driving up GPU prices and now threatens to make memory so expensive that consumer devices like laptops and phones become unaffordable.

It seems inevitable, then, that ASICs will eventually replace GPUs for at least running AI models, which is known as inferencing, even if the training of AI models may remain the purview of GPUs for a while longer. The question is when – and chips like Microsoft's Maia 200 are an attempt to say, "now."

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