Microsoft makes DeepSeek’s R1 model available on Azure AI and GitHub

Microsoft is bringing Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s R1 model to its Azure AI Foundry platform and GitHub today. The R1 model, which has rocked US financial markets this week because it can be trained at a fraction of the cost of leading models from OpenAI, is now part of a model catalog on Azure AI Foundry and GitHub — allowing Microsoft’s customers to integrate it into their AI applications.

“One of the key advantages of using DeepSeek R1 or any other model on Azure AI Foundry is the speed at which developers can experiment, iterate, and integrate AI into their workflows,” says By Asha Sharma, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of AI platform. “DeepSeek R1 has undergone rigorous red teaming and safety evaluations, including automated assessments of model behavior and extensive security reviews to mitigate potential risks.”

R1 was initially released as an open source model earlier this month, and Microsoft has moved at surprising pace to integrate this into Azure AI Foundry. The software maker will also make a distilled, smaller version of R1 available to run locally on Copilot Plus PCs soon, and it’s possible we may even see R1 show up in other AI-powered services from Microsoft.

DeepSeek’s R1 model has surprised Wall Street this week because it doesn’t need to use as many chips from providers like Nvidia, and it’s far cheaper to train. That’s put a huge dent in Nvidia’s market valuation, which dipped by nearly $600 billion at one point after investors were spooked by DeepSeek’s progress and the popularity of its mobile app.

OpenAI and Microsoft are now reportedly investigating whether the Chinese rival used OpenAI’s API to train DeepSeek’s models. Bloomberg reported earlier this week that Microsoft’s security researchers detected large amounts of data being used through OpenAI developer accounts late last year, which may have been connected to DeepSeek.