Azure Updates: AI Foundry; NVIDIA GB300; Storage Discovery

Azure OpenAI Service Product Lead Steve Sweetman teamed up with Senior Director Product Development Naomi Moneypenny to announce the availability of Sora 2 in Azure AI Foundry. The offering is currently in public preview, supporting a catalog of generative media models such as Sora, GPT-image1, GPT-image-1-mini, Black Forest Lab’s Flux 1.1, and KontextPro.

“Sora 2 in Azure AI Foundry isn’t just another video generation tool; it’s a creative powerhouse, seamlessly integrated into a platform built for innovation, trust, and scale. Unlike standalone solutions, Azure AI Foundry offers a unified platform where developers can access Sora 2 alongside other leading generative models in a secure, scalable, and structured environment to achieve more,” the two authors wrote. With the new features, customers can generate realistic videos based on text and images, sync video and audio, and integrate with business workflows.

Rani Borkar, President of Azure Hardware Systems joined CVP Nidhi Chappell to discuss the first large scale cluster with NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 for OpenAI workloads. The cluster is intended to be the first step toward scaling to hundreds of thousands of Blackwell Ultra GPUs across Microsoft AI datacenters. Earlier in 2025, Microsoft introduced ND GB200 v6 VMs based on NVIDIA Blackwell architecture. The latest generation of VMs are optimized for reasoning models, multimodal generative AI, and agentic AI systems. The setup involves a rack-scale system with 18 VMs and a total of 72 GPUs.