Microsoft rolls out VMs based on Cobalt 200 chip in preview, Maia 200 already in production
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Microsoft has announced a series of infrastructure updates during its Microsoft Build 2026 conference, including that its latest generation of Cobalt Arm chips is now available in early access preview.
Key facts
The Maia 200 is built using TSMC's 3nm technology and delivers around 10 petaflops of FP4 and five petaflops of FP8 compute performance within a 750W SoC (System-on-Chip) TDP (Thermal Design Power)
The Cobalt 200 was detailed back in November 2025 by Microsoft, and according to the company, it has a 50 percent increase in performance compared to the previous generation, Cobalt 100
Each Cobalt 200 SoC includes 132 active cores with 3MB of L2 cache per core and 192MB of L3 system cache
The new VMs will be available in preview in West US3, East US2, Central US, Sweden Central, East US, West US2, Spain Central, and Indonesia Central, with additional regions to be announced
Summary
The Cobalt 200 was detailed back in November 2025 by Microsoft, and according to the company, it has a 50 percent increase in performance compared to the previous generation, Cobalt 100, and is the result of an evaluation of more than 350,000 configuration candidates. Each Cobalt 200 SoC includes 132 active cores with 3MB of L2 cache per core and 192MB of L3 system cache. The new VMs will be available in preview in West US3, East US2, Central US, Sweden Central, East US, West US2, Spain Central, and Indonesia Central, with additional regions to be announced. The Maia 200 is built using TSMC's 3nm technology and delivers around 10 petaflops of FP4 and five petaflops of FP8 compute performance within a 750W SoC (System-on-Chip) TDP (Thermal Design Power) envelope. This, claims Microsoft, makes the Maia 200 the most performant chip from any hyperscaler, offering three times the FP4 performance of Amazon’s Tranium3 and Google’s seventh-generation TPU, Ironwood.