TECH

Elon Musk’s Grok AI reportedly coming to Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry

Microsoft engineers are gearing up to host Elon Musk’s Grok on Azure AI Foundry to let software developers make extensive use of the AI, claims report. Microsoft has now tapped multiple models including the most recent big success story, DeepSeek's R1.

Over the past few weeks, Microsoft’s engineers have been preparing to bring Elon Musk’s Grok AI model to Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry, The Verge reveals. It is believed that software developers using Azure AI Foundry will eventually be able to integrate Grok into their products as a result, in addition to being able to use the AI themselves.

If the model is eventually integrated into Azure, it’ll be available through Microsoft’s toolkit and hosted on Microsoft's servers with no training required for software developers. How tight the integration will be remains a mystery for now. We know Grok isn’t being trained on Microsoft’s servers; having scrapped its earlier deal with Oracle, xAI chose to build its own infrastructure for that.

This is all part of Microsoft’s broader effort to offer flexible access to various AI models. Microsoft has been expanding its AI platform, bringing in as many externally developed models as possible. Earlier this year, it quickly rolled out DeepSeek’s R1 model. In addition, Microsoft already uses or is considering other AI models in internal experiments, such as those from Meta and Anthropic. Grok fits into the same strategy of diversifying what's available on the Azure cloud service.

Given the news about strained relations between Microsoft and OpenAI, the timing of this decision is quite telling. At the same time, legal tensions between Elon Musk and OpenAI are still unfolding, which doesn’t make things any more straightforward. And while Microsoft still works closely with OpenAI, it’s also paying more attention to other artificial intelligence models.

No official announcements have been made about Microsoft collaborating with xAI yet but given that the Microsoft Build conference is taking place on May 19, there’s a chance we’ll learn more about the new partnership and its terms during that event.

mundophone