Microsoft is bringing Elon Musk’s AI models to its cloud

Microsoft Corp. is adding models from Elon Musk’s xAI to its artificial intelligence marketplace.

Grok 3, which Musk’s AI outfit introduced earlier this year, will be available on Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform, the company said on Monday.

Microsoft and its biggest rivals in selling rented computing power, including Amazon.com Inc. and Google, are vying to be the place where AI applications are built and deployed. That’s made a battleground out of the competition to host the latest models and build sophisticated controls to manage how they’re used.

Users of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service can tap into more than 1,900 variants of AI models, including those from close Microsoft partner OpenAI, as well as Meta Platforms Inc., and DeepSeek, the company said. The addition of Musk’s models increases the selection, but there remain notable absences, including models from Alphabet Inc.’s Google and hot AI startup Anthropic.

Many of the announcements on Monday at the start of Build, Microsoft’s annual developer conference, centered on products Microsoft is building to help manage agents, or AI tools designed to take action on a user’s behalf. The company said Windows, the ubiquitous PC operating system, and other Microsoft products would support Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, a set of standards the startup built to govern how AI systems interact.

“In order for agents to be as useful as they could be, they need to be able to talk to everything in the world,” Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott told reporters and analysts during a presentation at its Redmond, Washington-based headquarters on Sunday. Microsoft and its GitHub coding platform subsidiary also joined MCP’s steering committee.

Microsoft has staked a position as a leader in artificial intelligence tools, thanks in part to its massive investment in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. The company has infused AI into its products for corporate office workers and developers, betting that systems that can sprinkle intelligence and automation into the workplace will more than make up for the tens of billions Microsoft has spent on servers and data centers to power those products.

On Monday, Microsoft also introduced a variety of products designed to give developers and businesses additional insight and building blocks for generative AI. That includes a leaderboard of the top performing models, a tool designed to automatically help developers select the right model for a particular task, and new products for companies that want to build their own AI models using their internal data.

Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini will be available on Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry. The models also power a chatbot plugged into X, Musk’s social media site, where it spent part of last week surfacing a conspiracy theory about “white genocide” in South Africa. XAI later said there had been an “unauthorized modification” made to Grok’s X bot, and promised additional transparency into the prompts that guide the software.

Microsoft said in January that its AI suite—including cloud infrastructure and AI applications—was on pace to bring in at least $13 billion in annual revenue.

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