Investing.com – Goldman Sachs reiterated a Buy rating and $600.00 price target on Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) following the company’s announcement of its Maia 200 AI inference accelerator. Trading at $397.23, the stock appears undervalued according to InvestingPro analysis, with analysts setting a consensus upside of 51%.
Microsoft announced Maia 200, its updated custom accelerator for AI inference, on January 26, 2025. Goldman Sachs analyst Gabriela Borges noted that the company has made meaningful progress on its internal silicon strategy over the past year.
Before the January 26 update, limited benchmarking statistics were available on Maia 100 and industry feedback suggested Microsoft was behind competitor offerings. Initial disclosures suggest that Maia’s performance is now more comparable to competitors including Amazon’s Trainium and Google’s TPUs on raw compute performance.
Goldman Sachs views this as a meaningful positive for Microsoft’s price-performance for AI compute services and its long-term strategy to realize AI compute gross margins in Azure that are comparable to CPU-based Azure workloads. The company’s current gross profit margin stands at an impressive 69%, while maintaining a strong return on equity of 34%, demonstrating its ability to generate profitable growth from cloud services. The firm noted that Microsoft has access to all but one third-party custom accelerator architecture.
The firm identified limitations including the lack of performance statistics from Maia being used in volume for full production runs, the need to deepen the associated software ecosystem, and evolving competition with Google TPU v8 anticipated in 2027.For deeper insights into Microsoft’s AI strategy and financial health, InvestingPro offers comprehensive analysis including 12 additional ProTips and a detailed Pro Research Report covering all key investment factors.
In other recent news, Microsoft announced significant changes within its gaming division, with Sarah Bond and Phil Spencer departing the company. Asha Sharma will take over as executive vice president and CEO of Gaming, and Matt Booty has been promoted to executive vice president and chief content officer. In a separate development, Microsoft plans to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade to expand AI capabilities across developing nations in the Global South. Meanwhile, OpenAI introduced EVMbench, a new benchmark developed in partnership with Paradigm to test AI agents on smart contract security. This initiative aims to evaluate AI’s ability to detect, patch, and exploit vulnerabilities in blockchain smart contracts. Additionally, OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 has made a theoretical physics breakthrough by discovering new gluon interaction formulas. In other company news, Anthropic appointed former Microsoft and General Motors executive Chris Liddell to its board of directors, as the AI startup considers a potential initial public offering by 2026.
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