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.
Alongside that, developers get access to: Alongside pay-per-token (lowest-friction path to get started) and provisioned throughput (predictable, high-performance production workloads on frontier models), Foundry Managed Compute is the third deployment option in Foundry: a managed GPU platform-as-a-service for open-source and custom models.
You deploy a model instance described by the things that matter to your workload — parameter count, context length, and whether you want to optimize for latency or throughput — and Foundry handles the GPU topology underneath, whether the instance lands on one accelerator or several, so you think and plan in model terms.
Microsoft takes care of the machine: container updates, runtime upgrades, and security patches happen automatically on the supported runtimes — vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, NIM, TEI, llama.cpp — without redeploying your model, while model configuration, deployment behavior, and routing stay with you.
That consistency carries through the developer surface — pay-per-token, provisioned throughput, and Managed Compute share: Open-source models integrate with Foundry Agents the same way frontier models do, so you can mix model types in a single agent without a separate integration path.
Same code, same workflow. Quota is aligned to accelerator families, so a plan built on the H100 family today carries forward as new hardware generations come online.
Hugging Face is the public square of open AI: 15 million builders, 400,000 organizations, and over 3 million open models published, with new frontier capabilities — agentic coding, video segmentation, speech, embeddings — landing weekly. It's the GitHub of open models, where the community publishes weights, writes model cards, compares evaluations, and pulls models for experimentation.
Open models have closed the gap with proprietary models on benchmark after benchmark, and they unlock things proprietary endpoints can't: The catch has always been the operational layer: discovery, license review, security screening, runtime selection, GPU sizing, image building, CVE patching, and standing the model up behind an enterprise-grade endpoint. Hugging Face, by itself, is not an enterprise serving platform. Hugging Face models on Foundry is that operational layer, run by Microsoft.
From your side, an open-weight model in the Hugging Face Collection looks and behaves like any other model in the Foundry Model Catalog, and every model in the Collection has been put through a multi-stage publishing pipeline before it ever shows up there.
Because weights are pre-staged in Azure storage and runtime images live in a Microsoft-managed registry, your deployments won't need outbound network access to Hugging Face Hub — you can deploy to production inside a private network.
Hugging Face models on Foundry are powered by a versatile collection of community-built, open-source inference runtimes — each selected and tuned for Foundry Managed Compute, and matched to the model architectures it serves best. Across all runtimes, the systematic curation process means new versions and patches land on Foundry quickly, and existing model deployments are upgraded automatically — without requiring you to redeploy.
The Hugging Face Collection in the Foundry Model Catalog is where you start, and deployment is five steps: A deployment template is the unit of choice in step 2: a named, versioned asset that pins the runtime, the accelerator family and count, the context length, and the runtime-specific tuning needed to serve the model well — so picking a template is the only knob you turn for "how do I want this model to run."
qwen3-32b, for example, ships with four templates the deploy wizard exposes side by side: Each template arrives pre-tuned for the model — runtime settings, tool-call and reasoning parsers, scoring path, health probes, request concurrency, and any model-specific context-extension settings are all set by Microsoft, with any trade-offs called out inline in the template description. When you script the deploy, you reference the template and Foundry handles the rest.
A chat-completions model from the Collection slots into Foundry Agents as an admin-connected model and is callable through the Foundry Responses API with the same OpenAI SDK — same auth, same endpoint, same observability.
Available now in preview: the Hugging Face Collection in the Microsoft Foundry Model Catalog — thousands of models across every modality, refreshed weekly, deployable onto Foundry Managed Compute with NVIDIA A100, NVIDIA H100, or AMD MI300X accelerators in Global and Data Zone scopes, behind a unified Foundry endpoint with Playground support, first-class Azure Monitor metrics, per-deployment billing tags, and curated runtime upgrades and CVE patching applied automatically to your deployments.
On the roadmap: broader coverage of the Hugging Face ecosystem, additional accelerator families, and Bring Your Own Weights for fine-tuned and proprietary variants deployed through the same templates and governance as Collection models.
Hugging Face is where open models are published and discovered. Microsoft Foundry is where enterprises operationalize them — on curated, license-screened, security-screened weights hosted in Azure; on community-built and CVE-scanned runtimes; behind a single endpoint with enterprise identity, networking, observability, and agent integration on top. The breadth of the open-source ecosystem, with the operational layer Microsoft runs underneath.For a deep dive on Foundry Managed Compute — pricing, accelerator SKUs, data residency, enterprise readiness, observability, and the full Responses API + memory pattern — see the Managed Compute launch blog.