All the Azure news you don’t want to miss from Microsoft Build 2025

We’ve pulled together the top 25 announcements at Microsoft Build 2025 across the Azure business—spanning Azure AI Foundry, Azure infrastructure, Azure app platform, Azure databases and Microsoft Fabric, and our GitHub family.

At Microsoft Build, we came together to explore the next frontier: how developers will shape an agentic web. What felt different this year was gathering at a time of such exponential technological progress, making the power of community and the exchange of ideas more vital than ever. We’re reminded that in times of rapid change, open collaboration is what drives innovation. 

ChatGPT from OpenAI stands out as a prime example of the collaboration and innovation Microsoft is becoming known for. With over 500 million weekly active users, ChatGPT is one of the fastest-growing apps in history, and it is built entirely on Azure products and services. This deep collaboration is more than just a success story—it’s a blueprint for what’s possible when developers harness the full power of the Azure platform. As Jay Parikh, EVP of CoreAI, said in his keynote, “as builders, our most precious resource is time,” and time is key for our customers and their business needs. Together we want to harness AI to reshape business processes and bend the curve on innovation so everyone using the power of Azure can achieve more. 

Below, we’ve summarized the top 25 announcements across Azure’s business to keep you ahead—spanning Azure AI Foundry, Azure infrastructure, Azure application services, Azure databases, Microsoft Fabric, and our GitHub family. It’s amazing to see how AI is expanding the scope of Azure and to think about how far the cloud will take us. 

Here’s everything you don’t want to miss:

1. Coding agent levels up GitHub Copilot from a pair programmer to a full-fledged teammate to assign tasks like code reviews, writing tests, fixing bugs, and implementing full specs.
2. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Agent in Azure frees developers by monitoring systems around the clock, responding to incidents in real time, and troubleshooting autonomously.
3. New models joined Azure AI Foundry Models, including Grok 3 from xAI, Flux Pro 1.1 from Black Forest Labs, Sora on Azure OpenAI, and more from Hugging Face.
4. Microsoft Discovery was unveiled, offering a new enterprise agentic platform, which uses specialized agents and graph-based knowledge to accelerate research and development for scientists.
5. An AI-optimized data center that’s first to bring an interconnected NVIDIA Grace Blackwell system online, marking the most advanced AI training and inferencing platform in the world.
6. Cosmos DB (NoSQL) is in Microsoft Fabric as well as Azure Cosmos DB integration in Azure AI Foundry that streamlines handling of unstructured and semi-structured data critical for AI apps and agents.
7. SQL Server 2025, now in public preview, is designed to securely power AI applications—transforming into a vector database in its own right.
8. Model router in Azure AI Foundry allows developers to automatically select the optimal Azure OpenAI models for different prompts—boosting quality while reducing costs. 
9. Azure AI Foundry Agent Service is now generally available, helping more companies like JM Family, Fujitsu, and YoungWilliams automate some of the most complex business processes.
10. Multi-Agent Orchestration debuted for Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, providing connected agents and multi-agent workflows with support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) and more.
11. Digital Twin Builder is now in preview in Microsoft Fabric, enabling companies to create, manage, and visualize virtual replicas of physical and logical entities at scale simply, with no-code or low-code.
12. App modernization capabilities in GitHub Copilot can update, upgrade, and modernize Java and .NET applications while handling code assessments, dependency updates, and remediation, with mainframe modernization also coming soon. 
13. Agentic retrieval is now possible through Azure AI Search, using advanced techniques to improve answer relevance by up to ~40% on complex, multi-part questions in early tests. 
14. PostgreSQL extension for VS Code is new and improved in preview with GitHub Copilot built in, simplifying workflows and boosting productivity through AI-powered assistance.
15. Azure and SAP deepened its partnership, launching SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) and SAP Databricks on Azure, so developers can innovate on top of the core business data in SAP apps.  
16. Foundry Observability is now in preview, giving developers end-to-end monitoring, built-in metrics, and detailed trace logs of the reasoning steps and tool calls made by agents.
17. Chat with your data in Power BI is a new Copilot-powered experience for users to interact with their data through natural language, across any inputs, semantic models, apps and data agents they have access to.
18. Microsoft Entra Agent ID can now assign a unique, first-class identity to every agent built with Azure AI Foundry or Microsoft Copilot Studio, simplifying enterprise-grade identity management.
19. Data agents in Microsoft Fabric serve as virtual business analysts, which you can bring right into Copilot Studio and deploy across Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot.
20. Foundry Local is a new runtime for Windows and Mac for AI models and agents, allowing developers to build apps that work offline, keep sensitive data local, and reduce bandwidth costs.
21. Global Training and Developer Tier are two new offerings for Azure OpenAI in Azure AI Foundry, which make fine-tuning and evaluations of OpenAI models more accessible, affordable and globally available.
22. Azure Native Integrations give developers seamless access to software services directly through Azure portal, SDK, and CLI: Arise AI, LambdaTest HyperExecute, Mistral, MongoDB Atlas, and Neon.
23. Microsoft App Modernization Guidance packages decades of enterprise experience and technical patterns together to help companies analyze and prioritize modernization efforts.
24. Expanded data center capacity and new data residency options optimized specifically for AI, spanning over 70 regions worldwide—more than any other cloud provider.
25. Project Amelie was revealed as a new autonomous agent from Azure AI Foundry Labs with Microsoft Research, which can build complete machine learning pipelines from a single prompt.

Stay up to date with Azure

We’re constantly inspired by what developers are building on Azure—whether it’s breakthrough research, critical public services, or innovative customer experiences. Use cases from technology teams at the UK Met Office, Stanford Medicine, AISIN, Carvana, and the NFL are just a few examples of how developers are already coding towards this agentic future. It’s your feedback, creativity, and trust that shape Azure’s evolution, and we’re genuinely thankful to be a part of your journey.

You can still watch the day 1 ‘opening’ keynote, the day 2 ‘unpack the tech’ keynote, and stream key sessions from the catalog. We invite you to join the Microsoft developer community and to continue growing skills through Microsoft Learn.

To wrap, here are a few moments that stood out—capturing just a slice of the energy in Seattle.