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At Microsoft Build 2026, we announced Foundry Managed Compute and Hugging Face models on Foundry — a curated catalog of open-weight models from the Hugging Face ecosystem, refreshed weekly, deployable in one click onto Foundry Managed Compute. Weights are pre-staged in Azure, runtimes are built and scanned by Microsoft, and every model in the Collection ships with the same enterprise security, governance, observability, and billing that applies to every other model on Foundry.
The Platform: Microsoft Foundry and Managed Compute
Microsoft Foundry is a platform for building and operating agentic AI applications. Foundry starts with the widest model selection on any cloud — models from Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, DeepSeek, Hugging Face, and others, spanning frontier, open-source, and custom weights — all accessible through a single endpoint and a single set of SDKs in Python, C#, JavaScript, and Java.
On top of those models sits the Foundry Agent Service: multi-agent orchestration with built-in memory, knowledge grounding through Foundry IQ, and a catalog of connectable tools via agentic protocols, so agents can work with enterprise data. Once agents are running, Foundry provides end-to-end tracing, real-time monitoring, continuous evaluations, and a prompt optimizer that improves agent behavior based on eval results — observability and quality loops that are part of the platform.
