Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s cloud platform, delivering compute, storage, networking, databases, analytics, and AI services from global datacenters on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Azure hosts the Azure OpenAI Service, a managed offering that runs OpenAI models like GPT-4o, GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and DALL-E for enterprises. Microsoft invested billions in OpenAI and was its exclusive cloud provider until January 2025; today Azure remains a primary platform even as OpenAI diversifies to other clouds.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of computing resources—servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and AI—over the internet, letting you scale quickly and pay only for what you use instead of owning hardware