Microsoft news

Cerebras lifts its forecast and says Microsoft signed on

The AI chipmaker’s core revenue rose 70% to $230.9 million in the third quarter. It now expects $940 million to $960 million of core revenue in 2026. Chief executive Andrew Feldman said Microsoft signed a cloud deal, but no terms were given.

Cerebras reported results for the three months to September 30 on November 12, after the US stock market closed. Its shares rose about 17% in after-hours trading. Its cloud business, which rents out its chips, grew fastest.

Microsoft quits Nscale’s Essex AI data centre, reports say

The Telegraph and the BBC say Microsoft has ended its part in the planned UK site, which cannot get enough power until the 2030s. Microsoft declined to comment, and Nscale says it still plans to build.

Microsoft has pulled out of Nscale’s planned AI data centre in Loughton, Essex, the Telegraph reported on October 18. The BBC said it understood the same. Nscale, a British company, has been told that the site will not get its power until the 2030s. Microsoft declined to comment to the BBC, and Nscale says it remains committed to the project.

UK watchdog wants special status for Microsoft and Copilot

The UK’s competition regulator says Microsoft has a strong and lasting hold on business software, from Windows to Word, Teams and Copilot. If the status is confirmed by February, it can set rules, and it will first look at whether rival AI tools can compete with Copilot. Microsoft disagrees.

On October 16, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) proposed to give Microsoft “strategic market status” in its business software. The CMA found Microsoft strong in five areas, including PC operating systems and office software. Comments are due by November 13, and the final decision by February 13, 2027.

Microsoft finishes pre-training its 2.8T MAI-Base-2 model

The model has 2.8 trillion parameters and is not released yet. Microsoft says it beats every open-weight model it tested and needs 4.2 to 12.3 times less computing power than DeepSeek’s best base model; no outside group has checked this.

Microsoft AI said on October 15 that it has finished pre-training MAI-Base-2, its largest model so far. It is a mixture-of-experts model with 2.8 trillion parameters, of which 80 billion work on each token. The model is now in a second stage of training, and Microsoft gives no release date.

Microsoft fixes over 1,400 flaws in one month, a new record

Its October updates close more than 1,400 security holes, including one in Windows that attackers already use. Microsoft says AI-assisted research is adding to the bugs being found.

Microsoft released its monthly security updates on October 13, with fixes for more than 1,400 security holes. That beats September’s record of nearly 1,000. One Windows flaw was already being used in attacks. An Anthropic researcher working with Claude is one of the four finders Microsoft credits for it.

Microsoft’s Maia 300 chip will run its AI from 2027

Microsoft says its own chips will become the main system that runs AI in its products. It claims 40% more AI output per unit of power than leading GPU systems, but nobody outside has tested the chip yet.

Microsoft unveiled Maia 300, the third generation of its own AI chip, on October 12. It is built to run AI models rather than train them, and its production use starts in 2027. Microsoft plans to scale its Maia chips to several gigawatts of data-centre power from 2027.

Microsoft launches Decision-1, a fast model for AI choices

The model is built on Alibaba’s open Qwen3.5-9B and costs the same as Jev. Microsoft says it beat its rivals on 36 tests, and no outside group has checked that yet.

Microsoft released Microsoft-Decision-1 on October 9. It is a small model that scores a fixed list of options, such as yes or no, and gives a probability for each. It runs in Microsoft Foundry and on OpenRouter for $0.042 per million input tokens. Microsoft says it will soon rebuild it on its own models and on OpenAI’s.

Nadella says AI models need an ‘emergency brake’

Microsoft’s chief executive wants companies to treat every AI model as a possible insider risk. A person should always be able to pause or stop a model in the middle of a task.

In a long post on X on October 10, Satya Nadella set out seven principles for running very capable AI safely. Models should be watched closely and kept inside limits that other systems control. The post names no Microsoft product and no company’s incident.

Microsoft’s MXC sandbox for AI agents reaches version 1.0

Microsoft Execution Containers keep AI agents inside limits on Windows 11, macOS and Linux. The open-source kit left preview on October 7, and GitHub Copilot and OpenAI’s Codex already use it, Microsoft says.

Microsoft made its Execution Containers (MXC) generally available on October 7, four months after a first preview in June. Version 1.0 of the free, MIT-licensed kit has stable programming interfaces for Rust, .NET and Node.js. It lets developers decide which files and actions an AI agent may reach.

Microsoft’s RTX Spark Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599

Preorders opened on October 7, and the laptop ships on October 16. A $5,999 desktop box with the same Nvidia chip follows in November in the US. No independent reviews exist yet.

Microsoft opened preorders for the Surface Laptop Ultra on October 7, from $2,599. It uses Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip and up to 128GB of memory shared by the processor and graphics. Microsoft says it can run AI models with more than 120 billion parameters on the laptop itself. The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box costs $5,999.

Microsoft’s live transcription model tops an outside test

MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming turns speech into text as people talk, in 60 languages. Artificial Analysis’s leaderboard shows it with the fewest errors; Microsoft also added two new voice models.

Microsoft AI launched MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming on October 1, its first model that transcribes speech live, as a person is still talking. It is in public preview in Microsoft Foundry at an introductory $0.54 per audio hour. Microsoft also released two text-to-speech models, MAI-Voice-2.1 and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash.

Microsoft rebuilt Copilot around work

A new agent keeps working on its own. Bloomberg says Microsoft is quitting the personal-chatbot race.

Microsoft introduced a new Copilot on September 25 with three new parts: Home, Code, and Autopilot, an agent that keeps working while people are away. They reach early-access customers first. Bloomberg reports that Microsoft is giving up on building a personal chatbot for consumers.

Microsoft tells voters to check AI answers at the source

The company updated its voter-information campaign for the 2026 US elections. It asks people to open citations, use official local election pages, and treat AI output as a starting point.