Microsoft´s ambitious project to develop its own artificial intelligence chip, internally codenamed Braga, has encountered a significant setback, with new reports indicating a six-month delay that pushes mass production to 2026. Despite years of expensive research and development, insider sources claim the chip will not compete with Nvidia´s industry-leading Blackwell chips, which have already established a performance benchmark in the sector.
The delay stems from unexpected design changes, persistent staffing issues, and high turnover within Microsoft´s silicon engineering teams. A crucial factor was the late-stage addition of features requested by OpenAI, which resulted in instability during chip simulations and ultimately set the project back several months. Despite recognizing these setbacks, Microsoft reportedly did not revise its internal deadlines, putting heightened pressure on teams and causing up to a fifth of team members to leave certain units.
Microsoft has been working on multiple in-house silicon products since 2019, including the Maia 100—a 128-core Arm CPU that, while introduced in 2023, remains limited to internal testing rather than deployment in operational artificial intelligence services. Braga, along with future variants Braga-R and Clea, targets data center inference tasks, with staggered projected rollouts between 2025 and 2027. However, the Braga delay casts doubt across the entire timeline. There has also been a cancellation of a dedicated training chip, signaling further challenges facing Microsoft´s artificial intelligence hardware roadmap. As rivals Google and Amazon accelerate their own chip efforts, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has publicly questioned the value of custom silicon if it cannot surpass what is commercially available—a sentiment that recent Microsoft developments may prove accurate.
