Microsoft on Monday became one of the first hyperscalers to provide managed access to Grok, the AI model developed by billionaire Elon Musk's AI startup, xAI.

Microsoft has partnered with Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture, xAI, to bring its Grok AI models to the Azure cloud platform, despite recent criticism over the chatbot’s politically charged and racially controversial outputs.

“These models will have all the service level agreements (SLAs) Azure customers expect from any Microsoft product,” says Microsoft. The Grok AI models will be hosted and billed directly by Microsoft, and offered to its own product teams and customers through its Azure AI Foundry service.