He said they could use frontier models for the tasks where those models perform best, lower-cost models for other workloads and internally trained models when organisations do not want to rely on an external provider. Microsoft said its cloud catalogue now includes more than 11,000 models from providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and xAI, alongside Microsoft’s own MAI family. MAI models, Maia silicon and MDASHThe names describe different parts of Microsoft’s stack. Microsoft also said running its MAI models on Maia 200 produced 40% better performance per watt. Swappable models can lower inference costs, protect business continuity and give Microsoft more leverage as it expands its own MAI models and Maia silicon.