Microsoft Gearing Up to Host Musk's Grok AI Model

The Verge reported Thursday that Microsoft is preparing to host Elon Musk's Grok AI model. According to the report, the tech giant has been in talks with Musk's AI startup xAI in recent weeks about hosting the Grok model and making it available to customers and Microsoft's own product teams via its Azure cloud service.

According to the report, Grok will be available on Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft's developer platform that provides access to AI tools and models for hosting, running, and managing AI-driven applications.

Tensions have risen between Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT maker and Microsoft partner OpenAI, and Musk, an OpenAI co-founder who left the company in 2018 prior to its rapid growth.

The two are feuding over OpenAI's future. Musk sued OpenAI and Altman last year, alleging that they had abandoned the startup's original goal of developing AI for human benefit rather than corporate gain.

Last month, OpenAI filed a countersuit against Musk

According to the report, Microsoft intends to only provide capacity to host the Grok model, not servers for training future models.

According to The Verge, it is unclear whether Microsoft will sign an exclusive agreement to host the Grok AI model or whether other cloud providers, such as Amazon's AWS, will be able to do so as well.

Microsoft has been developing in-house AI reasoning models to reduce its reliance on OpenAI, and has begun testing models from xAI, Meta, and China's DeepSeek as potential replacements for its Copilot AI assistant, The Information reported in March.

Weeks after it gained popularity, Microsoft made DeepSeek's R1 model available on its Azure platform and GitHub developer tool.