Intel Foundry Secures Custom Chip Orders for Microsoft Maia 3 Accelerator

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Intel Foundry reportedly secured an 18A/18A-P order from Microsoft to produce Maia 3 AI accelerators, a notable win for Intel's advanced-node strategy.

Quick Report

Intel Foundry has reportedly landed a major 18A/18A-P manufacturing order from Microsoft to build Maia 2 AI accelerators, marking a significant vote of confidence in Intel's advanced-node roadmap.

Microsoft will have Maia 2 produced at Intel Foundry using the 18A or 18A-P process. The 18A-P variant adds refinements to RibbonFET and PowerVia, with packaging options that could help scale large AI accelerators. If yields and integration meet expectations, Microsoft may expand production on Intel nodes for future Maia generations, moving away from TSMC for at least some accelerator families. Maia 1 was built on TSMC N5 with CoWoS-S interposer and large HBM2E stacks; Maia 2 on Intel could change supply-chain dynamics for hyperscale AI hardware.

Key details reported include high on-die compute and memory configurations tailored for AI workloads, and Microsoft's interest in advanced packaging (18A-PT and 14A) for future designs should Maia 2 prove successful.

Written using GitHub Copilot GPT-4o-mini in agentic mode instructed to follow current codebase style and conventions for writing articles.

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