At Build, Microsoft described how Azure is supporting large AI workloads today, with an inference accelerator, high-bandwidth connections, and tools for efficiency and reliability.

Microsoft partners with xAI, Meta, Mistral and Black Forest Labs on AI models Models from OpenAI rivals will be hosted in Azure data centers New coding agent will carry out software development ...

For example, clients who want to train an AI model can access thousands of Nvidia GPUs in an Azure data center. Then, once that training session is complete, they no longer rent the computing power.

The company's Azure results came after a number of Wall Street analysts had lowered expectations as research reports said Microsoft had ended some data center lease obligations.