Microsoft

Microsoft has made its biggest move yet to run its artificial intelligence services on hardware of its own design. On Monday the company unveiled Maia 300, the third generation of its custom AI chip, and said it plans to deploy potentially more than a million of them starting next year in multi-gigawatt installations. Chief Executive Satya Nadella described the rollout as the company's biggest bet yet on its own silicon, and Azure executive Scott Guthrie said Maia is intended to become the primary system for running AI inference across Microsoft's products and services.

The AI agent wars are coming to the Windows desktop — and Microsoft just gave stage time to a rival.

At its Windows and Surface event in San Francisco on October 7, Microsoft announced that Meta's Muse personal AI agent is coming to Windows as a native app. Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft's executive vice president of Windows and Devices, said Muse for Windows would arrive "coming soon" with MXC integration — a notable move from a company that is simultaneously pushing its own Copilot agent.

Washington just took its biggest swing yet at Big Tech's favorite immigration pipeline. On Thursday, October 8, the Trump administration barred Microsoft, Adobe, and several of the world's largest IT services firms from the program that lets employers sponsor foreign workers for green cards, accusing them of systemic H-1B visa fraud.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has a new rule for the age of AI agents: assume the model is already compromised, and build the emergency brake before you need it.