Azure Updates: Claude in Foundry; Scaling NVIDIA Rubin; Partner opportunities

The new year is underway Microsoft is already bringing fresh updates to Azure products and services. 

Azure product lead Steve Sweetman explored ways to bridge the gap between AI and medicine with Claude in Microsoft Foundry. Microsoft has worked to shift Claude from general intelligence roles to domain expertise. Claude for healthcare offers a set of domain specific model intelligence tools to support healthcare providers, payers, and organizations, aligned with Anthropic’s standards. Claude for life science is aimed at accelerating every stage of R&D to create experimental and clinical protocols.

Sweetman highlighted the growing power of vertical-specific AI agents, with advanced model capabilities, domain specific connectors with model context protocol, and enterprise-ready deployment paths. “With Microsoft Foundry, customers can choose from a growing catalog of industry-leading models—including Claude—while benefiting from a unified platform for governance, observability, deployment, and compliance,” he wrote.

Rani Borkar, President of Azure Hardware Systems, shared details on Microsoft’s strategic AI datacenter planning as a way to scale NVIDIA Rubin deployments. Microsoft and NVIDIA showcased the NVIDIA Rubin platform at CES 2026. Azure datacenters are increasingly set up to accelerate computing, including integrations with NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 racks across what Microsoft describes as “next-gen AI superfactories.” 

“Microsoft has years of market-proven experience in designing and deploying scalable AI infrastructure that evolves with every major advancement of AI technology. In lockstep with each successive generation of NVIDIA’s accelerated compute infrastructure, Microsoft rapidly integrates NVIDIA’s innovations and delivers them at scale,” Borkar wrote.