Microsoft expands sovereign cloud capabilities to support AI models

Vendors are vying for customer budgets as geopolitical tensions and regulatory demands drive businesses to maintain control over their data.

Dive Brief: 

• Microsoft expanded its sovereign cloud capabilities to enable local, disconnected environments, including support for large AI models, the tech giant shared last week. 
• Qualified customers can bring large AI models into sovereign environments through Foundry Local, Microsoft’s on-device AI inference product used for running models locally in “fully disconnected environments,” Douglas Phillips, president and CTO, Microsoft Specialized Clouds, said in a blog post. 
• Azure Local and Microsoft 365 Local are also now available globally in Microsoft Sovereign Cloud to support confidential environments. Businesses can run critical infrastructure and keep governance and policy controls through Azure Local with no public cloud connectivity, while Microsoft 365 productivity workloads — Exchange Server, SharePoint Server and Skype for Business Server — run on Azure Local.