Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, shared the below communication with Microsoft employees this morning.

We are in the midst of a tectonic AI platform shift, one that requires us to both manage and grow our at-scale commercial business today, while building the new frontier and executing flawlessly across both.

History shows that general purpose technologies like AI drive step changes in productivity and GDP growth, and we have a unique opportunity to help our customers and the world realize this promise.

Our success depends on enabling commercial and public sector customers and partners to combine their human capital with new AI capabilities to change the frontier of how they operate. To accelerate this, we will increasingly need to bring together sales, marketing, operations, and engineering to drive growth and strengthen our position as the partner of choice for AI transformation.

With this context, I have asked Judson Althoff to take on an expanded role as CEO of our commercial business. Over the past nine years, Judson has led our global sales organization and was the architect behind designing and building Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) into what it is today: the “number one seed” in the industry and our company’s most important growth engine.

Takeshi Numoto and his marketing team will join this new organization, with Takeshi reporting directly to Judson as CMO, while also continuing to report directly to me on all-up business models, planning, consumer marketing, and corporate brand and communications.

Our operations organization will also move to report to Judson. By bringing operations into the commercial business, we can tighten the feedback loop between what customers need and how we deliver and support them. Carolina Dybeck Happe will continue to report to me, as she works on our overall company transformation and continues to closely partner with Judson.

Additionally, Judson will lead a new commercial leadership team that brings together leaders from engineering, sales, marketing, operations, and finance to drive our product strategy and governance, GTM readiness, and sales motions with shared accountability for the rigor and executional excellence our customers expect.

This will also allow our engineering leaders and me to be laser focused on our highest ambition technical work—across our datacenter buildout, systems architecture, AI science, and product innovation—to lead with intensity and pace in this generational platform shift. Each one of us needs to be at our very best in terms of rapidly learning new skills, adopting new ways to work, and staying close to the metal to drive innovation across the entire stack!!

This isn’t just evolution, it’s reinvention, for each of us professionally and for Microsoft.

Satya

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Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, shared the below communication with Microsoft employees this morning. We are in the midst of a tectonic AI platform shift, one that requires us to both manage and grow our at-scale commercial business today, while building the new frontier and executing flawlessly across both. History shows that general purpose technologies…
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This week we have introduced a wave of purpose-built datacenters and infrastructure investments we are making around the world to support the global adoption of cutting-edge AI workloads and cloud services.

Today in Wisconsin we introduced Fairwater, our newest US AI datacenter, the largest and most sophisticated AI factory we’ve built yet. In addition to our Fairwater datacenter in Wisconsin, we also have multiple identical Fairwater datacenters under construction in other locations across the US.

In Narvik, Norway, Microsoft announced plans with nScale and Aker JV to develop a new hyperscale AI datacenter.

In Loughton, UK, we announced a partnership with nScale to build the UK’s largest supercomputer to support services in the UK.

These AI datacenters are significant capital projects, representing tens of billions of dollars of investments and hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge AI chips, and will seamlessly connect with our global Microsoft Cloud of over 400 datacenters in 70 regions around the world. Through innovation that can enable us to link these AI datacenters in a distributed network, we multiply the efficiency and compute in an exponential way to further democratize access to AI services globally.

So what is an AI datacenter?

The AI datacenter: the new factory of the AI era

An AI datacenter is a unique, purpose-built facility designed specifically for AI training as well as running large-scale artificial intelligence models and applications. Microsoft’s AI datacenters power OpenAI, Microsoft AI, our Copilot capabilities and many more leading AI workloads.

The new Fairwater AI datacenter in Wisconsin stands as a remarkable feat of engineering, covering 315 acres and housing three massive buildings with a combined 1.2 million square feet under roofs. Constructing this facility required 46.6 miles of deep foundation piles, 26.5 million pounds of structural steel, 120 miles of medium-voltage underground cable and 72.6 miles of mechanical piping.

Unlike typical cloud datacenters, which are optimized to run many smaller, independent workloads such as hosting websites, email or business applications, this datacenter is built to work as one massive AI supercomputer using a single flat networking interconnecting hundreds of thousands of the latest NVIDIA GPUs. In fact, it will deliver 10X the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputer today, enabling AI training and inference workloads at a level never before seen.

The role of our AI datacenters – powering frontier AI

Effective AI models rely on thousands of computers working together, powered by GPUs, or specialized AI accelerators, to process massive concurrent mathematical computations. They’re interconnected with extremely fast networks so they can share results instantly, and all of this is supported by enormous storage systems that hold the data (like text, images or video) broken down into tokens, the small units of information the AI learns from. The goal is to keep these chips busy all the time, because if the data or the network can’t keep up, everything slows down.

The AI training itself is a cycle: the AI processes tokens in sequence, makes predictions about the next one, checks them against the right answers and adjusts itself. This repeats trillions of times until the system gets better at whatever it’s being trained to do. Think of it like a professional football team’s practice. Each GPU is a player running a drill, the tokens are the plays being executed step by step, and the network is the coaching staff, shouting instructions and keeping everyone in sync. The team repeats plays over and over, correcting mistakes until they can execute them perfectly. By the end, the AI model, like the team, has mastered its strategy and is ready to perform under real game conditions.

AI infrastructure at frontier scale

Purpose-built infrastructure is critical to being able to power AI efficiently. To compute the token math at this trillion-parameter scale of leading AI models, the core of the AI datacenter is made up of dedicated AI accelerators (such as GPUs) mounted on server boards alongside CPUs, memory and storage. A single server hosts multiple GPU accelerators, connected for high-bandwidth communication. These servers are then installed into a rack, with top-of-rack (ToR) switches providing low-latency networking between them. Every rack in the datacenter is interconnected, creating a tightly coupled cluster. From the outside, this architecture looks like many independent servers, but at scale it functions as a single supercomputer where hundreds of thousands of accelerators can train a single model in parallel.

This datacenter runs a single, massive cluster of interconnected NVIDIA GB200 servers and millions of compute cores and exabytes of storage, all engineered for the most demanding AI workloads. Azure was the first cloud provider to bring online the NVIDIA GB200 server, rack and full datacenter clusters. Each rack packs 72 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, tied together in a single NVLink domain that delivers 1.8 terabytes of GPU-to-GPU bandwidth and gives every GPU access to 14 terabytes of pooled memory. Rather than behaving like dozens of separate chips, the rack operates as a single, giant accelerator, capable of processing an astonishing 865,000 tokens per second, the highest throughput of any cloud platform available today. The Norway and UK AI datacenters will use similar clusters, and take advantage of NVIDIAs next AI chip design (GB300) which offers even more pooled memory per rack.

The challenge in establishing supercomputing scale, particularly as AI training requirements continue to require breakthrough scales of computing, is getting the networking topology just right. To ensure low latency communication across multiple layers in a cloud environment, Microsoft needed to extend performance beyond a single rack. For the latest NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 deployments globally, at the rack level these GPUs communicate over NVLink and NVSwitch at terabytes per second, collapsing memory and bandwidth barriers. Then to connect across multiple racks into a pod, Azure uses both InfiniBand and Ethernet fabrics that deliver 800 Gbps, in a full fat tree non-blocking architecture to ensure that every GPU can talk to every other GPU at full line rate without congestion. And across the datacenter, multiple pods of racks are interconnected to reduce hop counts and enable tens of thousands of GPUs to function as one global-scale supercomputer.

When laid out in a traditional datacenter hallway, physical distance between racks introduces latency into the system. To address this, the racks in the Wisconsin AI datacenter are laid out in a two-story datacenter configuration, so in addition to racks networked to adjacent racks, they are networked to additional racks above or below them.

This layered approach sets Azure apart. Microsoft Azure was not just the first cloud to bring GB200 online at rack and datacenter scale; we’re doing it at massive scale with customers today. By co-engineering the full stack with the best from our industry partners coupled with our own purpose-built systems, Microsoft has built the most powerful, tightly coupled AI supercomputer in the world, purpose-built for frontier models.

Addressing the environmental impact: closed loop liquid cooling at facility scale

Traditional air cooling can’t handle the density of modern AI hardware. Our datacenters use advanced liquid cooling systems — integrated pipes circulate cold liquid directly into servers, extracting heat efficiently. The closed-loop recirculation ensures zero water waste, with water only needed to fill up once and then it is continually reused.

By designing purpose-built AI datacenters, we were able to build liquid cooling infrastructure into the facility directly to get us more rack-density in the datacenter. Fairwater is supported by the second largest water-cooled chiller plant on the planet and will continuously circulate water in its closed loop cooling system. The hot water is then piped out to the cooling “fins” on each side of the datacenter, where 172 20-foot fans chill and recirculate the water back to the datacenter. This system keeps the AI datacenter running efficiently, even at peak loads.

Over 90% of our datacenter capacity uses this system, requiring water only once during construction and continually reusing it with no evaporation losses. The remaining 10% of traditional servers use outdoor air for cooling, switching to water only during the hottest days, a design that dramatically reduces water usage compared to traditional datacenters.

We’re also using liquid cooling to support AI workloads in many of our existing datacenters; this liquid cooling is accomplished with Heat Exchanger Units (HXUs) that also operate with zero-operational water use.

Storage and compute: Built for AI velocity

Modern datacenters can contain exabytes of storage and millions of CPU compute scores. To support the AI infrastructure cluster, an entirely separate datacenter infrastructure is needed to store and process the data used and generated by the AI cluster. To give you an example of the scale — the Wisconsin AI datacenter’s storage systems are five football fields in length!

We reengineered Azure storage for the most demanding AI workloads, across these massive datacenter deployments for true supercomputing scale. Each Azure Blob Storage account can sustain over 2 million read/write transactions per second, and with millions of accounts available, we can elastically scale to meet virtually any data requirement.

Behind this capability is a fundamentally rearchitected storage foundation that aggregates capacity and bandwidth across thousands of storage nodes and hundreds of thousands of drives. This enables scale to exabyte scale storage, eliminating the need for manual sharding and simplifying operations for even the largest AI and analytics workloads.

Key innovations such as BlobFuse2 deliver high-throughput, low-latency access for GPU node-local training, ensuring that compute resources are never idle and that massive AI training datasets are always available when needed. Multiprotocol support allows seamless integration with diverse data pipelines, while deep integration with analytics engines and AI tools accelerates data preparation and deployment.

Automatic scaling dynamically allocates resources as demand grows, combined with advanced security, resiliency and cost-effective tiered storage, Azure’s storage platform sets the pace for next-generation workloads, delivering the performance, scalability and reliability required.

AI WAN: Connecting multiple datacenters for an even larger AI supercomputer

These new AI datacenters are part of a global network of Azure AI datacenters, interconnected via our Wide Area Network (WAN). This isn’t just about one building, it’s about a distributed, resilient and scalable system that operates as a single, powerful AI machine. Our AI WAN is built with growth capabilities in AI-native bandwidth scales to enable large-scale distributed training across multiple, geographically diverse Azure regions, thus allowing customers to harness the power of a giant AI supercomputer.

This is a fundamental shift in how we think about AI supercomputers. Instead of being limited by the walls of a single facility, we’re building a distributed system where compute, storage and networking resources are seamlessly pooled and orchestrated across datacenter regions. This means greater resiliency, scalability and flexibility for customers.

Bringing it all together

To meet the critical needs of the largest AI challenges, we needed to redesign every layer of our cloud infrastructure stack. This isn’t just about isolated breakthroughs, but composing multiple new approaches across silicon, servers, networks and datacenters, leading to advancements where software and hardware are optimized as one purpose-built system.

Microsoft’s Wisconsin datacenter will play a critical role in the future of AI, built on real technology, real investment and real community impact. As we connect this facility with other regional datacenters, and as every layer of our infrastructure is harmonized as a complete system, we’re unleashing a new era of cloud-powered intelligence, secure, adaptive and ready for what’s next.

To learn more about Microsoft’s datacenter innovations, check out the virtual datacenter tour at datacenters.microsoft.com.

Scott Guthrie is responsible for hyperscale cloud computing solutions and services including Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, generative AI solutions, data platforms and information and cybersecurity. These platforms and services help organizations worldwide solve urgent challenges and drive long-term transformation.

The post Inside the world’s most powerful AI datacenter appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

This week we have introduced a wave of purpose-built datacenters and infrastructure investments we are making around the world to support the global adoption of cutting-edge AI workloads and cloud services. Today in Wisconsin we introduced Fairwater, our newest US AI datacenter, the largest and most sophisticated AI factory we’ve built yet. In addition to…
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Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the next phase of our partnership. We are actively working to finalize contractual terms in a definitive agreement. Together, we remain focused on delivering the best AI tools for everyone, grounded in our shared commitment to safety.

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Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the next phase of our partnership. We are actively working to finalize contractual terms in a definitive agreement. Together, we remain focused on delivering the best AI tools for everyone, grounded in our shared commitment to safety.
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Today, Microsoft and the US General Services Administration (GSA) announced a comprehensive agreement to bring a suite of productivity, cloud and AI services, including Microsoft 365 Copilot at no cost for up to 12 months for millions of existing Microsoft G5 users, to help agencies rapidly adopt secure and compliant advanced AI tools that will enhance operations, strengthen security and accelerate innovation for the American people. As an unparalleled milestone in advancing GSA’s OneGov strategy, Microsoft’s offerings will be available through a governmentwide unified pricing strategy that is expected to drive $3 billion in cost savings in the first year alone.

Enabling AI innovation and acceleration for federal agencies

This expansive offering will help agencies achieve key pillars of the America’s AI Action Plan by enabling federal agencies to serve at the forefront on driving AI innovation and adoption in service to the American people. Through this agreement federal agencies will access the latest AI capabilities at scale, now integrated in many of the products they already use, to achieve key administration priorities:

• Transforming productivity with AI: A unique Microsoft 365 and Copilot suite, offered exclusively to the federal government, enables agencies to automate workflows, analyze data and collaborate more efficiently, freeing public servants to focus on their core mission.
• Driving automation with AI agents: With AI agents, and no per-agent fees, agencies can build solutions for citizen inquiries, case management and contact centers, extending the reach and responsiveness of government services.
• Accelerating cloud modernization: With significant Azure discounts and the waiving of data egress fees, agencies can modernize infrastructure, reduce barriers to interagency collaboration and unlock the full power of advanced analytics and AI.
• Streamlining government operations: Dynamics 365 applications help agencies enhance citizen service, optimize supply chains and increase field responsiveness, directly impacting everyday public outcomes.
• Strengthening security across all levels: Integrated platforms such as Microsoft Entra ID and Sentinel provide advanced identity and threat protection, supporting the Zero Trust journey across federal environments.

Federal agencies can opt-in to any or all of these offers through September 2026, with discounted pricing available for up to 36 months.

Innovation meets security

Agencies can quickly adopt these solutions knowing these services have already achieved key FedRAMP security and compliance authorizations, meeting more than 400 critical security controls established in NIST 800-53 standards. Microsoft 365, Azure and our key AI services are authorized at FedRAMP High. Microsoft 365 Copilot received provisional authorization from the US Department of Defense, with FedRAMP High expected soon.

Investing for the future

Our commitment goes beyond technology and savings. Microsoft is also committing $20 million in additional support services to help agencies implement the offers and maximize the value of these services, along with complimentary cost-optimization workshops that will enable agencies to identify opportunities to reduce software duplication, automate services and improve cross-team interoperability. These investments reflect our belief that technology’s greatest value lies in its ability to empower people.

Taken together, we anticipate these services have the potential to deliver more than $6 billion in total estimated value over three years.

For more than four decades, Microsoft has been privileged to support the US government’s most vital missions. Today, as we stand at the forefront of the AI era, we reaffirm our dedication to serving as a trusted partner — one that listens, innovates responsibly and shares in the mission to advance the nation’s public good. We look forward to the next chapter helping agencies harness secure AI and cloud solutions to build a stronger, more resilient and more innovative future for all.

To learn how to take advantage of these offers, contact your Microsoft representative or authorized reseller*. For any additional questions, you can email our Microsoft OneGov team.

*Microsoft OneGov offers are applicable to Microsoft federal customers with Enterprise Agreements and exclude AOS-G and CSP programs; Azure Consumption Discounts and waived egress fees applicable to select Governmentwide Acquisition Contracts.

The post Accelerating AI adoption for the US government appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Today, Microsoft and the US General Services Administration (GSA) announced a comprehensive agreement to bring a suite of productivity, cloud and AI services, including Microsoft 365 Copilot at no cost for up to 12 months for millions of existing Microsoft G5 users, to help agencies rapidly adopt secure and compliant advanced AI tools that will enhance…
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Over the past fiscal year, our customers and partners have driven pragmatic outcomes by implementing AI-first strategies across their organizations. With AI Transformation as their framework, we helped them enrich employee experiences, reinvent customer engagement, reshape business processes and bend the curve on innovation for their people, businesses and industries. Now, we are partnering to go beyond what they thought possible to unlock even greater potential by restructuring and centralizing their business strategies with an AI-first mindset. Our cloud and AI capabilities are leading the industry, and we are committed to working closely with our customers and partners to meet their increasingly complex needs and help them become frontier AI firms.

Below are several stories from the past quarter reflecting the success we have seen broadly this past year. Each showcases what we can achieve together with an approach grounded in AI business solutions, cloud and AI platforms, and security.

AI is blurring the lines between personal and organizational productivity, and we are helping our customers leverage Copilots and agents combined with human ambition to create differentiation.

With over one million customers in Argentina, Banco Ciudad launched a digital transformation initiative focused on AI, productivity and security. What began as a pilot program quickly grew into broad adoption with the bank implementing Microsoft 365 Copilot to improve productivity, Microsoft Copilot Studio to develop agents and Microsoft Azure to scale their AI solutions. As a result, the bank strengthened its operational resilience, empowered teams, drove sustainable growth and improved customer engagement — even in a challenging economic environment. So far, the bank has freed up 2,400 employee work hours annually with savings projected to generate $75,000 USD monthly.

As one of the country’s largest financial institutions, Commonwealth Bank of Australia is harnessing AI to meet rising customer expectations by developing smarter, more secure and highly customizable banking experiences at scale. To ensure employees have the confidence and expertise to leverage AI effectively, the bank launched a structured skilling initiative to empower them with the knowledge needed to adopt AI effectively. Eighty-four percent of 10,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot users reported they would not go back to working without it; and nearly 30% of GitHub Copilot code suggestions were adopted, driving efficiency and smarter decision-making.

Nonprofit Make-A-Wish is dedicated to granting hope by fulfilling wishes for children with critical illnesses across the United States. Fragmented systems, limited data access and the need to protect sensitive information were creating challenges for the organization to operate effectively, so it turned to partner Redapt for support. Make-A-Wish deployed comprehensive Microsoft cloud and AI solutions — including Azure Cloud Services, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio — to unify its data, rebuild core applications and boost staff productivity. This transformation enabled the organization to increase operational efficiency, improve collaboration across national and regional chapters and strengthen its data security to protect sensitive family data.

Sheló NABEL, a wellness and beauty company based in Mexico, faced operational challenges as it expanded its network of independent entrepreneurs. With support from partner Best Practices Consulting, the company integrated Microsoft Dynamics 365 to gain real-time market insights and optimize its demand planning across more than 400 products. They also integrated Microsoft Copilot to enhance customer service and increase operational efficiency with AI. As a result, the company has achieved a 17% increase in sales, 5X faster reporting processes and real-time inventory control.

Based in Saudi Arabia, technology and communications company Unifonic serves millions of people across 160 countries. As their business began to scale rapidly, they faced challenges managing a growing hybrid workforce while maintaining strong security and compliance standards. To solve this, the company deployed Microsoft 365 E5 and Microsoft 365 Copilot to automate workflows and secure data in one platform. This unified ecosystem enabled teams to reduce time spent on audits by 85%, save two hours per day on cybersecurity governance, save $250,000 USD in costs and reduce time to set up client demos by 15%.

Microsoft has the leading cloud platform for AI innovation with Azure as the infrastructure, Azure AI Foundry as the applications server and Fabric as the data platform.

As legal professionals face challenges with manual data entry, document generation and compliance-heavy processes, Assembly Software aimed to transform how they handle complex, time-consuming workflows. Using Azure AI Foundry, the company built NeosAI — a fully embedded generative AI solution that automates nearly every aspect of the legal workflow — from document intake to drafting and reporting. As a result, law firms using NeosAI report saving up to 25 hours per case, with document drafting time reduced from 40 hours to just minutes. This AI solution is not only boosting productivity and reducing stress for legal professionals but also enabling firms to serve more clients with greater speed and accuracy.

One of the world’s oldest continuously operating companies, Husqvarna Group, faced increasing pressure to modernize its network of factories, supply chains and distribution channels to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving landscape. The company implemented a comprehensive Microsoft Azure solution — including Azure Arc, Azure IoT Operations and Azure OpenAI — to unify cloud and on-premises systems, enable real-time data insights and drive innovation across global manufacturing operations. As a result, the company achieved a 98% reduction in data deployment time, cut infrastructure imaging costs by 50% and significantly improved productivity and uptime across its connected factories.

Serving over 600,000 members in the United States, Members 1st Federal Credit Union sought to modernize its data infrastructure to deliver more personalized member experiences and support data-driven decision-making. The credit union faced challenges with siloed data across more than 15 sources and legacy systems with limited analytics capabilities. With support from partner 3Cloud, the credit union combined Azure SQL, Azure Data Factory and Azure Databricks to extract, log and centralize enterprise-wide data into a cutting-edge data lakehouse. Machine learning models that took 36 hours to run can now be done in three to four hours — a reduction of about 89%. Additionally, updates within its customer relationship management software now take 30 to 40 minutes compared to three to four hours previously.

NTT DATA, a global IT and business services leader headquartered in Japan, sought to accelerate decision-making and unlock deeper insights by overcoming limitations of legacy dashboards and siloed data systems. Serving clients in over 50 countries, the company needed a more intuitive, scalable and AI-driven approach to data access and analysis. NTT DATA deployed Microsoft Fabric, Azure AI Foundry Agent Service and Azure AI Foundry to enable the creation of conversational AI tools that allow employees to retrieve and act on real-time data. This agentic AI platform significantly improved productivity, reduced time to market for new solutions by 50% and laid the foundation for broader adoption of multi-agent frameworks across the organization.

University of Venda, a public higher education institution in South Africa, modernized its IT infrastructure to support its strategic goal of producing globally competitive graduates while meeting the evolving needs of its regional and international students. Facing challenges with aging on-premises servers, frequent service interruptions and a six-month hardware procurement cycle, the university sought a more agile and reliable solution. By deploying Microsoft 365, migrating 18 systems to Microsoft Azure and leveraging Microsoft Unified Support, the university achieved 99% service uptime and reduced resource provisioning time from six months to under 12 hours. This transformation significantly improved system reliability, scalability and security, enabling students and staff to access essential services seamlessly from anywhere. 

Security is the foundation for AI Transformation. We are helping our customers and partners defend against threat actors and secure their environments with Microsoft’s cloud and AI solutions. 

Following its spinoff from Eli Lilly, Elanco sought to modernize its IT and security infrastructure by building a secure, scalable digital environment from the ground up. The company deployed a comprehensive Microsoft solution stack comprised of Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft Defender suite, Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Security Copilot. This integrated approach streamlined global IT operations across 90 countries, enabling Elanco to accelerate security response times by 50% with a future-ready, secure and efficient digital ecosystem that empowers their workforce.

Kern County faced significant challenges securing and governing their data across 40 departments — each operating with fragmented IT systems. With an approach grounded in data protection, the county deployed Microsoft Purview as part of its Microsoft 365 Government G5 suite. The implementation resulted in the classification of over 13 million files, near-total adoption of sensitivity labels and over 3,000 data loss prevention alerts in a single month. A validation assessment also showed the county saved about $1 million in mitigation risk and potential noncompliance. This transformation strengthened audit readiness, reduced data exposure risks and laid a secure foundation for future innovation.

Headquartered in the Czech Republic, Mews provides cloud-based property management solutions to help modernize hotel operations worldwide. As it scaled its platform to serve thousands of properties worldwide, the company faced increasing cybersecurity threats and sought to strengthen its security posture and streamline threat detection. By deploying Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft Security Copilot, they enabled real-time monitoring, automated threat response and centralized visibility across its cloud infrastructure. As a result, the company reduced incident response times from hours to minutes and enhanced its ability to meet stringent compliance requirements to ensure secure growth in a highly regulated industry.

Puritan Life Insurance Company of America transformed its business model by launching Canvas Annuity — a direct-to-consumer digital distribution platform built entirely on Microsoft Azure. With the security features built into the technology out of the box, the team can detect and block malware attacks and threats, manage security efficiently and more easily pass regulatory, financial and information security audits. By creating a secure, scalable and user-friendly platform, customers can now purchase annuities online in just 10 minutes — a speed previously unheard of. Since launching, the company has seen a 700% increase in annual premium revenue, with the platform now accounting for 75% of premiums every year.

Facing growing cyber threats to its research, Singapore Management University needed to maintain seamless access for students and faculty while ensuring compliance with the country’s stringent data privacy regulations. The university implemented Microsoft’s Zero Trust framework by integrating Microsoft Security Copilot with Microsoft’s comprehensive security suite to strengthen protection while maintaining academic accessibility. This helped reduce response times and ease workloads for security teams while also supporting security analysts to streamline incident investigations, summarize complex multistage attacks and receive guided response recommendations in real time. The integrated security solution reduced operational costs and enhanced compliance reporting while maintaining seamless access to research resources.

For additional AI Transformation stories, check out AI-powered success—with more than 1,000 stories of customer transformation and innovation.

I could not be more excited by our mission than I am today — and I believe we have never been closer to bringing it to life than we are right now. With Microsoft’s leading technology and expertise, we are helping our customers and partners implement AI to bring out the best in individuals, organizations and companies. We are partnering to reinvent their business strategies and move beyond AI adoption alone to innovate with purpose and shape their futures as frontier AI firms. The opportunity to differentiate your business through AI Transformation and pave the way for industry leadership is now.

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Over the past fiscal year, our customers and partners have driven pragmatic outcomes by implementing AI-first strategies across their organizations. With AI Transformation as their framework, we helped them enrich employee experiences, reinvent customer engagement, reshape business processes and bend the curve on innovation for their people, businesses and industries. Now, we are partnering to…
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Today, we are taking the next step in strengthening our European Digital Commitments to empower our customers with greater choice, more control over their data privacy and the most robust digital resilience we have ever offered. Building on our 42-year history as a company in Europe, we are expanding our efforts with Microsoft Sovereign Cloud. This offer spans both public cloud and private digital infrastructure, ensuring our customers can choose the right balance of control, compliance and capability for their needs.

With this expanded offering we are announcing Data Guardian for European operations, External Key Management for customer-controlled encryption, Regulated Environment Management for simplified configuration and Microsoft 365 Local for critical productivity services in private cloud environments.

This brings together comprehensive productivity, security and cloud solutions designed to enable European organizations to grow, compete and lead on their own terms and with more control than ever before across Sovereign Public Cloud, Sovereign Private Cloud and National Partner Clouds.

Building on our experience delivering sovereignty solutions that meet the needs of highly regulated customers and government agencies, our Sovereign Public Cloud is an evolution and expansion of the Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty and will be offered across all existing European datacenter regions, for all European customers, across enterprise services such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Security and Power Platform. Sovereign Public Cloud ensures customer data stays in Europe, under European Law, with operations and access controlled by European personnel, and encryption is under full control of customers. This is enabled for all customer workloads running in our European datacenter regions requiring no migration.

Microsoft’s new Sovereign Private Cloud will support critical collaboration, communication and virtualization services workloads on Azure Local. This solution now integrates Microsoft 365 Local and our security platform with Azure Local, providing consistent capabilities for hybrid or air-gapped environments to meet resiliency and business continuity requirements.

In France and Germany, our National Partner Clouds offer comprehensive capabilities of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure in an independently owned and operated environment. In France, we have an agreement with Bleu, a joint venture between Orange and Capgemini, for Bleu to operate a “cloud de confiance” for the French public sector, critical infrastructure providers and essential services providers that is designed to meet SecNumCloud requirements. In Germany, we have an agreement with Delos Cloud, an SAP subsidiary, for Delos Cloud to operate a sovereign cloud for the German public sector that is designed to meet the German government’s Cloud Platform Requirements.

Across our Sovereign Public Cloud, Sovereign Private Cloud and support for National Partner Clouds, Microsoft Sovereign Cloud offers the most comprehensive set of sovereignty solutions in the industry for integrated productivity, security and cloud.

Sovereign Public Cloud for all Microsoft Cloud customers in Europe

Many technology providers have approached sovereignty as niche requirements for a unique set of customers that require a specific deployment approach that at times is at odds with the economics and innovation of public cloud systems. This often requires running duplicate systems and teams, migrating to separate environments and limiting access to cutting-edge technologies like AI. However, Microsoft’s Sovereign Public Cloud builds an evolving set of sovereign capabilities that can be configured to meet specific needs without sacrificing functionality or requiring migration to specialized datacenters. With Microsoft’s Sovereign Public Cloud currently in preview and set to be generally available in all European cloud regions later this year, we will introduce new features and solutions that reinforce this vision.

Announcing Data Guardian

Our EU Data Boundary already provides an industry-leading commitment to store and process your data on infrastructure located in Europe. Data Guardian will add an additional level of assurance by ensuring that only Microsoft personnel residing in Europe control remote access to these systems. Data Guardian adds additional human and technical oversight whenever engineers outside of Europe need access. All remote access by Microsoft engineers to the systems that store and process your data in Europe is approved and monitored by European resident personnel in real time and will be logged in a tamper-evident ledger.

Announcing External Key Management to extend Azure Managed HSM

Encryption under the full control of customers provides an additional guarantee of data protection. With external key management, customers can connect Azure to keys stored on their own Hardware Security Module (HSM) on-premises or hosted by a trusted third party. We’re working with major HSM manufacturers such as Futurex, Thales and Utimaco to ensure their support.

Announcing Regulated Environment Management

The Regulated Environment Management service will allow customers to easily manage all these features in one place (for instance, configuring Data Guardian policies or reviewing access log entries). Regulated Environment Management will be at the center of the customer experience for configuring, deploying and monitoring workloads in support of sovereign operations. Together, these tools will be at the center of the customer experience for configuring, deploying and monitoring workloads in the Sovereign Public Cloud.

Sovereign Private Cloud with Azure Local and Microsoft 365 Local

While strengthening sovereign controls in public cloud environments is critical, we also understand that some scenarios require certain workloads be run in a physical environment under full customer control to support business continuity risk mitigation. Azure Local delivers Microsoft cloud services in customer locations, enabling organizations to meet specific data residency and sovereignty requirements. It includes core Azure capabilities — such as compute, storage, networking and virtualization services — while providing a consistent management and developer experience. Azure Local is ideal for delivering services closer to where data is generated or regulated, whether in-country, on-premises or in partner-operated datacenters. Microsoft’s Sovereign Private Cloud solution is in preview today and will be generally available later this year.

Announcing Microsoft 365 Local

Microsoft 365 Local provides customers with additional choice by bringing together Microsoft’s productivity server software into an Azure Local environment that can run entirely in a customer’s own datacenter.

This provides a simplified deployment and management framework for organizations to run Microsoft’s trusted productivity servers in environments they fully control. Built on our validated reference architecture and powered by Azure Local, Microsoft 365 Local enables customers to deploy Microsoft productivity workloads like Exchange Server and SharePoint Server in their own datacenters or sovereign cloud environments — with full control on security, compliance and governance.

Private Sovereign Cloud is designed for governments, critical industries and regulated sectors that need to meet the highest standards of data residency, operational autonomy and disconnected access.

Building a sovereign cloud and AI partner ecosystem for Europe

To support European customers in implementing and operating sovereign solutions, we are also excited to preview a new Microsoft Sovereign Cloud specialization in the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. This specialization will provide our European customers the ability to identify Partners who have differentiated themselves based on their demonstrated capabilities in supporting their Sovereign Cloud ambitions on Microsoft technology. Our preview partners include Accenture, Arvato Systems, Atea, Atos, Crayon, Capgemini, Dell Technologies, IBM, Inspark, Infosys, Lenovo, Leonardo, NTT Data, Orange, Telefonica and Vodafone.

“The launch of Microsoft Sovereign Cloud marks a pivotal moment in empowering European institutions and industries with the control, compliance and innovation they need to thrive in today’s digital economy,” said Aiman Ezzat, CEO of Capgemini Group.

“As a shareholder of Bleu, we have already set up a National Partner Cloud in France in order to deliver Microsoft technologies in a sovereign environment that respects the French State requirements. With decades of experience in Microsoft technologies and deep expertise in regulated sectors, we are uniquely positioned to help our clients harness the full power of Microsoft’s sovereign public and private cloud solutions. Together, we are enabling a trusted digital future for Europe.”

Delivering on our digital commitments to Europe

Together, Microsoft Sovereign Cloud is grounded in our European Digital Commitments and offers the best mix of choice, control and resilience for European customers. Microsoft is proud to offer the broadest set of sovereignty solutions available on the market today and we will constantly look for new ways to ensure our European customers have the options and assurances they need to operate with confidence.

In a time of geopolitical volatility, we are committed to providing digital stability. With each step we take in this journey, we invite open dialogues with our customers, policymakers and regulators as we continue to innovate.

The post Announcing comprehensive sovereign solutions empowering European organizations appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Today, we are taking the next step in strengthening our European Digital Commitments to empower our customers with greater choice, more control over their data privacy and the most robust digital resilience we have ever offered. Building on our 42-year history as a company in Europe, we are expanding our efforts with Microsoft Sovereign Cloud….
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