Azure Updates: Mistral Large 3; Azure Local; Claude Opus 4.5

Coming on the heels of Ignite 2025, Microsoft has continued to keep its focus on AI as the year begins to wrap up. Azure Product Lead Steve Sweetman announced the introduction of Mistral Large 3 in Microsoft Foundry. The new offering provides customers with an open-weight Apache-licensed frontier model set, adding to options like DeepSeek and GPT OSS. It is intended to meet enterprise application needs like long-context comprehension, multimodal reasoning, predictable performance, and reliable instruction following. 

“With the addition of Mistral Large 3, Foundry continues to expand its position as the cloud platform with the widest selection of open and frontier models, unified under a single, enterprise-ready ecosystem,” Sweetman wrote. “Foundry provides an end-to-end workspace for model development, evaluation, and deployment, including unified governance, observability, and agent-ready tooling.” He noted that organizations can integrate the model with Foundry, run it in a VPC, fine-tune or customize it, and export weights for hybrid and on-prem deployments. Pricing for the global standard offering is at a rate of 50 cents for one million tokens of input and $1.50 for the same number of outputs.

President and CTO Douglas Phillips explored new ways to run mission-critical workloads with Azure AI. He observed that many organizations need to operate under stricter standards that require enhanced scalability, advanced analytics, and ways to keep operating during network outages. To address these challenges, Microsoft introduced Azure Local, Azure infrastructure situated in distributed locations including customers’ own datacenters. Local includes integrated compute, networking, storage, and Arc capabilities.