Earlier this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella moved with haste to get engineers to test and deploy DeepSeek’s R1 model on Azure AI Foundry. It was an unusually quick turnaround for a new model on Azure that also set a new bar for success.
A few months later, Nadella then pushed to onboard xAI’s Grok 3 models, in a deal that saw them arrive on Azure AI Foundry just in time for the first day of Microsoft’s Build developer conference in May. Elon Musk even appeared during Nadella’s…
