Microsoft and xAI are coming together for their first major partnership. Announced at Microsoft’s Build developer conference, the company is including xAI’s Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini on the list of models available through Azure AI Foundry.
The Foundry is a system run by Microsoft. It allows developers to design, customize, and build AI applications and agents. It offers pre-built models and built-in tools to speed up the process of designing AI applications.
Microsoft has been building up the list of models available through the platform, offering models from Deepseek, Meta, OpenAI, Google, and more. Considering the impact Grok has had, this addition won’t come as a surprise.
“Microsoft and xAI are thrilled to unveil the availability of Grok 3 into the Azure AI Foundry Models, marking a significant milestone in AI accessibility and innovation,” said Vaidyaraman Sambasivam, the partner Head of product for Azure AI, in an announcement blog post.
“This collaboration combines xAI’s cutting-edge models with Azure’s enterprise-ready infrastructure, giving developers access to Grok 3’s advanced capabilities in a secure, scalable environment. Grok models enable a range of enterprise scenarios with advanced capabilities in reasoning, coding, and visual processing. “
Grok is now available via the platform for both developers and IT specialists to experiment with.
Why could this be controversial?
xAI has been making waves in AI recently, competing with the likes of OpenAI, Google, and Deepseek. While it had a slow start, Grok has come a long way, especially in terms of its coding power.
However, it hasn’t been without its issues. xAI is in the middle of a feud with OpenAI over Elon Musk’s involvement with the company. Musk sued OpenAI last year, with the company quickly counter-suing against him.
This wouldn’t normally make much of a difference in a deal like the one struck between Grok and Microsoft, except for the fact that OpenAI and Microsoft have a very close relationship.
xAI has been making waves in AI recently, competing with the likes of OpenAI, Google and Deepseek. While it had a slow start, Grok has come a long way, especially in terms of its coding power.
Microsoft is one of OpenAI’s biggest funders, and they often work collaboratively on AI development. Microsoft Azure is the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI, and Microsoft uses some of OpenAI’s products.
Grok also recently came under fire when the model was found doubting statistics around the holocaust and other controversial opinions coming from the chatbot in conversations.
However, despite these concerns, Microsoft was quick to highlight Grok’s position as a key player in the AI coding space. Hosting thousands of other AI models on the Azure AI Foundry, Grok was bound to be added at some point too.
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