Microsoft (MSFT, Financial) is adding Elon Musk's Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini models to its Azure AI Foundry, deepening its reach into the generative AI battlefield. The move comes as part of Microsoft's broader strategy to become the go-to platform for building and deploying AI applications. With this addition, Azure now offers more than 1,900 model variants—including from OpenAI, Meta, and DeepSeek—while Google and Anthropic remain noticeably absent. The inclusion of Grok follows a recent controversy where the model, embedded in Musk's social platform X, surfaced misleading content—a misstep xAI attributed to an “unauthorized modification.” Despite this, Microsoft is pressing ahead, offering developers more model optionality at a time when enterprise demand for flexibility is rising.
At its annual Build developer conference, Microsoft showcased several updates aimed at strengthening its AI infrastructure. Among them: new tools to help businesses manage AI agents—software designed to act on a user's behalf. Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott emphasized that for agents to be useful, they need to “talk to everything in the world.” The company is also joining the steering committee for Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, a technical standard that governs how AI systems interact—despite Anthropic's own models still being unavailable on Azure. Microsoft is clearly positioning itself not just as a cloud vendor, but as the connective tissue for AI innovation across the industry.
The company's AI business is gaining traction fast. Microsoft previously guided to at least $13 billion in annualized revenue across its AI offerings, which include both infrastructure and application layers. At Build, it introduced a model leaderboard, a tool to recommend the best model for a given task, and new systems to help enterprises train AI using their proprietary data. The addition of Grok brings a high-profile—if somewhat controversial—player into Microsoft's expanding ecosystem. It could help Microsoft draw more developers who want alternatives to OpenAI while further entrenching Azure as the cloud platform of choice in the generative AI arms race.
