Introducing Mistral Large 3 in Microsoft Foundry: Open, capable, and ready for production workloads

By Dustin Ward

Enterprises today are embracing open-weight models for their transparency, flexibility, and ability to run across a broad range of deployment architectures. As the number of open models grows, the bar for reliability, instruction-following quality, multimodal reasoning, and long-context performance continues to rise.  Today, we’re excited to announce that Mistral Large 3 is now available in Azure, bringing one of the…

A decade of open innovation: Celebrating 10 years of Microsoft and Red Hat partnership

By Dustin Ward

Ten years ago, Microsoft and Red Hat began a partnership grounded in open source and enterprise cloud innovation. This year, we celebrate a decade of collaboration. Our journey together has helped customers accelerate hybrid cloud transformation, empower developers to innovate, and strengthen the open source community to drive modern application innovation​. Accelerate modernization with Azure…

Azure networking updates on security, reliability, and high availability

By Dustin Ward

Enabling the next wave of cloud transformation with Azure Networking The cloud landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace, driven by the exponential growth of AI workloads and the need for seamless, secure, and high-performance connectivity. Azure Network services stand at the forefront of this transformation, delivering the hyperscale infrastructure, intelligent services, and resilient architecture…

Introducing Claude Opus 4.5 in Microsoft Foundry

By Dustin Ward

We’re at a real inflection point in the AI landscape, a threshold where models move from useful assistants to genuine collaborators. Models that understand the objective, factor in constraints, and execute complex multi-tool workflows. Models that not only support processes, but help restructure them for reliability, scale, and operational efficiency. Anthropic’s newest model, Claude Opus…

Amazon Bedrock adds reinforcement fine-tuning simplifying how developers build smarter, more accurate AI models

By Dustin Ward

Organizations face a challenging trade-off when adapting AI models to their specific business needs: settle for generic models that produce average results, or tackle the complexity and expense of advanced model customization. Traditional approaches force a choice between poor performance with smaller models or the high costs of deploying larger model variants and managing complex…

New serverless customization in Amazon SageMaker AI accelerates model fine-tuning

By Dustin Ward

Today, I’m happy to announce new serverless customization in Amazon SageMaker AI for popular AI models, such as Amazon Nova, DeepSeek, GPT-OSS, Llama, and Qwen. The new customization capability provides an easy-to-use interface for the latest fine-tuning techniques like reinforcement learning, so you can accelerate the AI model customization process from months to days. With…