Microsoft said on Monday that it is adding Grok — the AI model produced by Elon Musk’s xAI — to the growing list of third-party AI models it offers via its cloud service. Microsoft will offer customers the option to run versions of xAI’s Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini models hosted and billed directly by Microsoft, the company said.
Customers, and Microsoft’s own product team would be able to make use of it through the Azure Cloud service. This move could prove to be controversial internally as it could exacerbate tensions with Microsoft’s partner OpenAI.
If the deal proceeds, Grok would reportedly be available on Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft’s AI development platform that gives developers access to AI services, tools, and pre-built models in order to build AI applications and agents. This would allow developers to tap into Grok and use it within their apps, and for Microsoft to potentially use the AI model across its own apps and services.
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This is the first time a major cloud provider has partnered with xAI, the company Musk founded in direct opposition to OpenAI. Grok joins other third-party models from Meta, Mistral, and Cohere in Azure’s growing multi-model ecosystem.
Microsoft’s decision to support Grok comes in spite of the company’s ties to Grok’s rival OpenAI, in which it had invested $14 million. While Microsoft has positioned Azure as an open platform for the best-performing models, onboarding Grok signals that no AI model is off limits.
Recently, Microsoft also announced NLWeb, an open project designed to “simplify the creation of natural language interfaces for websites — making it easy to turn any site into an AI-powered app,” per a blog post. NLWebs would let websites build conversational interfaces using “the model of their choice and their own data,” Microsoft says.
Microsoft said in a post that this “emerging vision of the internet is an open agentic web, where AI agents make decisions and perform tasks on behalf of users or organizations.”