Microsoft Settles Activision Suit, Preps AI Chip for Anthropic as Veteran Marketer Departs

Microsoft's Maia 200 chip deal with Anthropic, leadership overhaul, and $250M Activision settlement signal strategic shift; stock flat near €361.

The week closes out with a trio of moves at Microsoft that underscore a company in flux: a costly legal settlement, a foray into licensing its custom silicon to a third-party AI lab, and the departure of a 35-year company veteran. Each piece points to strategic recalibration — and the stock is barely blinking.

In a landmark shift, Microsoft is in advanced talks to let Anthropic run its AI workloads on the Redmond giant’s own Maia 200 processors. The chips, built on TSMC’s 3-nanometer process and packing over 140 billion transistors with 216 GB of HBM3e memory, are designed primarily for inference rather than training. According to internal estimates, the Maia 200 offers roughly a 30% improvement in the price-to-performance ratio over existing Azure offerings. For Anthropic, which already benefits from Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar investment, the appeal is lower operating costs without sacrificing model quality. The deal would also mark the first time Microsoft lets an external developer tap its proprietary hardware — a move that could loosen the industry’s reliance on Nvidia’s GPUs.

Parallel to the chip discussions, a significant leadership reshuffle is underway. Yusuf Mehdi, the company’s chief consumer marketing officer and a fixture since the Windows 95 era, has announced his departure. He will stay on through the end of fiscal 2027 to oversee the transition and help realize the “One Copilot” vision. Meanwhile, CEO Satya Nadella has dismantled the traditional Senior Leadership Team, replacing it with a five-person core group and a 35-person engineering council — a structure Nadella says is designed to prepare for what he calls the “agentic era” of superintelligence.

The stock, meanwhile, is treading water. On Friday, Microsoft shares changed hands at €360.90, barely moved from the prior session. That price is roughly 5% above the 50-day moving average but more than 22% below the 52-week high of €467.45 — and about 23% below the dollar-denominated peak. Year-to-date, the stock is down nearly 11%. Analysts remain bullish nonetheless, with price targets ranging from $547 to $640, underpinned by the continued surge in Azure AI services. In the most recent quarter, revenue climbed 18.3% to $82.89 billion.

Institutional investors are sending mixed signals. Vanguard increased its stake by 2.3%, bringing its total to over 717 million shares — a position that now represents roughly 5% of Microsoft’s overall equity. Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square made a fresh bet, building a new position of about 5.65 million shares. On the other side, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sold off its remaining 7.7 million shares in the first quarter, citing its capital-distribution goals tied to the 2045 horizon.

The Activision Blizzard litigation that has dogged Microsoft since the 2023 megadeal is now in the rearview mirror. The company agreed to pay $250 million to settle claims brought by former Activision shareholders, led by Sweden’s Sjunde AP-Fonden. The plaintiffs had alleged that former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick engineered the $68.7 billion acquisition (valued at $75.4 billion including assumed liabilities) primarily to protect his own position, to the detriment of other shareholders. Microsoft and Kotick continue to deny the allegations; the settlement carries no admission of wrongdoing.

For Microsoft, the $250 million payout is a manageable 0.3% of quarterly revenue. More consequential is the departure of a marketing veteran like Mehdi just as the next major Windows cycle begins — and the quiet bet that in-house silicon can start to erode the dominance of external chip suppliers. The transition period runs until June 2027. A dividend of $0.91 per share is due in June.