Microsoft

Microsoft said it would scale the Azure Maia family to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027. Microsoft said Maia would become its primary inference system for its products and services.

Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 5.5 as its small model in the Claude 5.5 family. Anthropic said the model was available across its platforms, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure; AWS announced availability on Amazon Bedrock and Claude Platform on AWS.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 became available to Game Pass Premium members. The game remained available through Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass.

Microsoft said Undead Labs had transitioned to a new publisher. It said State of Decay 3 would release on Xbox Game Pass on its first day.

Xbox said there were no changes to previously announced games coming to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate on day one. The statement addressed reports that day-one releases could be removed in a 2027 restructuring.

Microsoft said GPT-6 Astra was generally available for all customers in Microsoft Foundry. A separate Microsoft Foundry post said the model was beginning rollout through a Limited Access Program and would expand to participating customers over subsequent days.

CNBC put the decision in a wider Microsoft context: after years of unlimited streaming, the company said it was looking for a better balance between usage and costs, and its executives had been working out how to charge customers by usage across product lines.

The same announcement opened cloud gaming to people without a Game Pass subscription: buy hours through the store and stream games you already own. Metering the hours is what makes selling them separately possible.

The company framed the change as touching a small minority, and said those who run out will be able to buy more playtime through the Xbox Store.

From November, streaming is capped at 15 hours a month on Ultimate, 10 on Premium and 5 on Essential. Games installed locally through Game Pass are unaffected; only cloud streaming is metered.

Sony moved to dismiss the consolidated PS5 case in the Northern District of California on August 31, after Microsoft's August 21 motion in the Western District of Washington and Nintendo's on July 20, all arguing that paying an advertised price for a voluntarily purchased console is not a legal injury and that the price rises reflected inflation, component costs and demand rather than tariffs alone. Sony noted its second, $100 increase came after the tariffs were struck down. Costco and Walmart said refunds would flow to customers as lower prices; Nintendo's refund was put at about $300 million.

Meta presented the MTIA 400 from its March roadmap and Microsoft gave its deepest account of Maia 200's architecture: 140 billion transistors, six HBM3E stacks and a 750 W envelope, a deliberately less aggressive design than its rivals'. ServeTheHome noted that AI accelerators had overtaken CPUs as the largest track at the conference, a measure of how much engineering the hyperscalers now put into their own silicon.

The Information reported that Microsoft was targeting a public unveiling of Maia 300 as soon as September and negotiating TSMC capacity for more than 300,000 units in 2027, an order dwarfing the tens of thousands of Maia 200 chips built so far, with a longer-term aim of more than a million. Maia 200 had been delayed after early tests missed targets and was running in only a few data centers; Nadella had told investors on July 29 it delivered 30 percent better performance per dollar.

AMD launched the Instinct MI400 series, with the MI455X in Helios racks for frontier AI and the MI430X for sovereign AI and HPC, and named OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, HUMAIN, Tensorwave, Vultr and Cirrascale among the organisations choosing Helios.

AMD said Microsoft would ramp AMD Helios at scale on Azure. The deployment was intended to power frontier-model inference for Microsoft, its AI customers and Azure AI services.

Asha Sharma said Helen Chiang was promoted to chief operating officer. Chiang would report directly to Sharma.

Asha Sharma told staff the division would shed up to 3,200 people, about 20 percent of headcount, over the following year, and that Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, Compulsion Games and Double Fine would be spun out or sold. Her memo said the bet on Game Pass, multi-platform publishing and a broader content portfolio had created meaningful value but had not grown at the pace the company expected.

After a voluntary retirement programme Microsoft eliminated 4,800 jobs immediately, with Xbox cutting 3,200 in total, half at once and half through fiscal 2027, and spinning off four studios, as the stock trailed its megacap peers on AI spending. It was Microsoft's fourth large round in fourteen months.

Trevor Hastings filed a proposed consumer class action against Microsoft. The complaint alleged Microsoft could collect tariff-related costs from consumers and also receive federal tariff refunds.

Speaking publicly at The Games Business, Xbox's new strategy chief put a size on the damage from the October increase. It was the first acknowledgement from inside the company that the rise had driven subscribers away.

Sony said it does not determine launch timing for next-generation hardware based on competitors' movements. The statement was included in Sony's summary of its June 5 meeting.

Ball, known for an annual state-of-video-gaming report, was announced by the new Xbox chief executive Asha Sharma alongside a new chief technology officer, part of a run of outside hires into the leadership.

The price cut came with a trade. New Call of Duty games would no longer arrive on Ultimate or PC Game Pass at launch, joining about a year later instead, though titles already in the library stayed.

Six months after the rise, Ultimate came down from $29.99 to $22.99 a month and PC Game Pass from $16.49 to $13.99. The reversal left Ultimate above where it had been a year earlier but well below the October price.

OpenAI said it had closed its financing round with $122 billion in committed capital at a post-money valuation of $852 billion, naming NVIDIA, Amazon and SoftBank as anchor investors with continued participation from Microsoft. CNBC reported the total was up from the $110 billion OpenAI had announced in February and called it the largest private funding round in Silicon Valley history.

NVIDIA unveiled the Rubin platform, which it said comprised six chips. It said AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure would be among the first to deploy Vera Rubin-based instances.

Matt Booty was elevated to executive vice president and chief content officer. He would report to Asha Sharma.

Microsoft announced a reorganization of its gaming division. Windows Central reported that Phil Spencer was retiring.

Anthropic said its $30 billion Series G round included part of Nvidia's previously announced investment. Anthropic reported a $380 billion post-money valuation for the round.

Microsoft announced its second-generation accelerator, a TSMC 3nm part it called the most efficient inference system it had deployed, claiming 30 percent better performance per dollar than alternatives, and began installing it in its US Central region. It runs OpenAI's GPT-5.2, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Foundry and the superintelligence team's work; unlike Maia 100 it is meant to reach cloud customers eventually.

Nvidia and Microsoft announced investments of up to $10 billion and $5 billion in Anthropic, with Anthropic committing to buy $30 billion of Azure capacity and up to a gigawatt of Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems, and to optimise Claude for Nvidia hardware. It gave Nvidia equity in both of the leading frontier labs.

After the OpenAI recapitalization, Satya Nadella said on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast that Microsoft has rights to the IP for the custom chips OpenAI is developing with Broadcom, gets access to all of OpenAI's system-level innovation, and would first build what OpenAI designs for OpenAI and then extend it into Microsoft's own infrastructure. The arrangement tied the Maia roadmap to OpenAI's chip program.

Days after the Amethyst video, the AMD-focused leaker KeplerL2 said a 2027 PS6 launch was the plan unless unexpected delays happened, and Moore's Law Is Dead said the next Xbox, on an AMD chip he called Magnus, was targeting 2027 as well. A 2027 date would have matched the seven-year gap between the PS4 and PS5; within four months the memory market had put it in doubt.

Day-one access to new first-party games stayed exclusive to the top tier, and Microsoft put a number on it for the first time.

Microsoft replaced Core and Standard with Essential and Premium, kept Ultimate at the top and moved every existing subscriber across automatically. Ultimate's price went from $19.99 to $29.99 a month, a 50 percent rise, justified by a larger library and added services.

Microsoft opened Xbox Cloud Gaming access to Xbox Insiders subscribed to Game Pass Core or Standard. The access was described as a beta offering.

On the second day of its fiscal year Microsoft cut about 9,000 jobs, under 4 percent of the workforce, after 6,000 in May and 300 in June, hitting Xbox hardest with cancelled games and studio closures while the company committed about $80 billion to AI data centres for the year. Roughly 15,000 Microsoft jobs went in 2025.

Data Center Dynamics, citing The Information, reported that mass production of Microsoft's next-generation Maia chip, code-named Braga and expected to ship as Maia 200, had been pushed to 2026. The delay left Microsoft behind Google and Amazon on custom silicon and was still visible in Maia 200's limited footprint a year later.

Xbox president Sarah Bond announced a strategic multi-year partnership with AMD to co-engineer silicon for the next generation of Xbox consoles, handhelds, PC and cloud, with backward compatibility promised. Both console makers were now publicly building their next machines on AMD, setting up the parallel 2027 timelines that leakers would report in October.

AMD reported that Microsoft said Instinct MI300X was powering proprietary and open-source models in production on Azure. The statement concerned Azure production workloads.

Microsoft cut 3 percent of its 228,000 employees across levels and geographies, its largest round since the 10,000 cuts of 2023, including 1,985 in Washington state. The company said the cuts were not performance-related and were meant to flatten management, weeks after Satya Nadella said AI was writing up to 30 percent of code in some projects.

OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in new funding at a $157 billion post-money valuation. Axios reported that Nvidia joined the round led by Thrive Capital.

Microsoft began offering Xbox Insiders access to try Xbox Game Pass Standard. It said participants could provide feedback on the new membership.

Citing The Information, The Register reported that Nvidia had told Microsoft of delays to the most advanced Blackwell parts, with volume shipments pushed to the first quarter of 2025 and TSMC's CoWoS packaging suspected as the cause. Nvidia's statement did not confirm a delay: it said sampling had started and production was on track to ramp in the second half.

Microsoft said Xbox Game Pass for Console would stop accepting new users. It also announced a forthcoming Game Pass Standard tier without day-one releases.

Microsoft announced that annual Xbox Game Pass Core would cost $74.99, up from $59.99. Its monthly price would remain $9.99.

Microsoft announced a PC Game Pass price increase from $9.99 to $11.99 per month in the United States. The price change applied to PC Game Pass.

Microsoft announced a new US Game Pass Ultimate price of $19.99 per month. The change was part of a package of Game Pass changes.

Microsoft confirmed that Game Pass members could play Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on day one. The announcement concerned the game's Game Pass availability.

AMD said Azure ND MI300X V5 instances were generally available. Hugging Face was identified as the first customer.

At its first Foundry Direct Connect event Intel relaunched the business as Intel Foundry, combining technology development, manufacturing and foundry services, unveiled the 14A node beyond 18A, and had Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella say Microsoft had chosen a design to be built on Intel 18A.

Microsoft said its games would come to Game Pass on day one. The statement was made in its business update.

Microsoft said it had 34 million Xbox Game Pass subscribers. A Microsoft spokesperson told Windows Central that the figure included Game Pass Core subscribers.

At Advancing AI 2023 AMD announced availability of the MI300X accelerator and the MI300A APU. Microsoft announced Azure virtual machines built on MI300X, Oracle Cloud planned MI300X offerings, and Dell, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro showed systems using the parts.

Microsoft showed the Azure Maia 100 AI accelerator and the Arm-based Cobalt 100 CPU, chips it had been testing in secret in a Redmond lab, and said they would start rolling out to its data centers in early 2024 to run Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service. Maia 100 was never offered to cloud customers; its significance was that the last of the big three clouds had joined Google and Amazon in designing its own AI silicon.

Xbox Live Gold was converted into Xbox Game Pass Core. Microsoft said the change would take effect on September 14.

Microsoft raised the US Console Game Pass price from $9.99 to $10.99 per month. It also raised Game Pass Ultimate from $14.99 to $16.99 per month.

Microsoft said it reached a binding 10-year legal agreement with Nintendo. The agreement concerned Call of Duty availability for Nintendo Switch devices.

Microsoft said more than 25 million Xbox Game Pass members played Xbox games each month. The figure was included in its Activision Blizzard acquisition announcement.

Phil Spencer said Microsoft had previously announced that Game Pass passed 18 million members. He described the milestone as occurring earlier in 2021.

Microsoft delayed EA Play's inclusion in PC Game Pass and Game Pass Ultimate until 2021. The delay applied to the PC release.

Microsoft said it had teamed up with Electronic Arts to provide EA Play memberships to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC members. The memberships would be provided at no additional cost.

Microsoft said Xbox Game Pass had more than 15 million members. It said those members were from 41 countries.

Microsoft ended the introductory PC Game Pass price. It said Xbox Game Pass for PC would be available for $9.99 a month.

Microsoft launched Xbox Game Pass for PC and made Game Pass Ultimate broadly available. PC Game Pass was added to Ultimate at no additional cost.

Microsoft announced Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. The tier combined Xbox Game Pass with Xbox Live Gold.

Microsoft said new Xbox One exclusive games from Microsoft Studios would enter Xbox Game Pass on their global release date. The policy covered future releases.

Xbox Game Pass became available to all users with an Xbox Live account. Xbox Live Gold members received early access before the general availability date.

Microsoft announced Xbox Game Pass for $9.99 per month. It said the service offered access to more than 100 Xbox One and backward-compatible Xbox 360 games.