On Wednesday, cloud and enterprise software giant (NASDAQ: MSFT) held its Ignite conference, which included a bunch of exciting announcements. Unsurprisingly, many centered on artificial intelligence (AI), where Microsoft is perceived to have an early lead thanks to its investment in OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT.

However, an in-house, custom-designed AI chip is one area Microsoft has lacked. That is, until Wednesday when it unveiled the company's first custom AI accelerator and CPU processor. Given Microsoft's clout as a top AI cloud provider, a new custom chip has the potential to shake up the AI market and the fortunes of several key players.

At the event, Microsoft unveiled Maia, its new AI accelerator. Like other cloud providers with custom chips, Microsoft will likely market Maia for customers looking to save money on AI training and inference workloads and who don't wish to pay up for expensive Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) graphics processing units (GPUs).

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Source Fool.com