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Microsoft Foundry

Using Arctic on Microsoft Foundry

Implementation guide · Arctic · Snowflake

Provisioned

Quick Start

  1. 1
    Create an account at Microsoft Foundry and generate an API key.
  2. 2
    Use the Microsoft Foundry SDK or REST API to call arctic — see the documentation for request format.
  3. 3
    You'll be billed $2.00/1M input, $2.00/1M output tokens.

About Microsoft Foundry

Microsoft Foundry offers a comprehensive platform-as-a-service for enterprise AI operations. It provides multiple deployment options including Serverless APIs (pay-as-you-go), Global Standard (shared managed capacity), Provisioned Throughput Units (reserved capacity), batch processing, and bring-your-own model deployments. The platform features a unified control plane for models, agents, tools, and observability. Its Agent Service enables building and deploying AI agents with built-in tracing, monitoring, and governance. Evaluation and monitoring tools assess model performance, safety, and groundedness. Foundry supports seamless upgrades from Azure OpenAI with non-destructive migration, maintaining existing deployments while unlocking multi-provider model access and advanced platform capabilities.

Microsoft Foundry is a unified enterprise AI platform that significantly expands beyond Azure OpenAI. It functions as a multi-provider hosting and deployment platform for LLMs, supporting models from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, xAI, Meta, Mistral, NVIDIA, and others. Foundry integrates agent services, evaluation, observability, and governance into a single Azure control plane. Key capabilities include a multi-provider model catalog, Model Router for intelligent prompt routing, Foundry Agent Service for building and deploying AI agents with built-in tracing and monitoring, and enterprise-grade governance with RBAC, compliance, and regional deployments. For broader model catalog including Claude, DeepSeek, Grok, Llama, Mistral, and NVIDIA Nemotron, Foundry is the recommended platform over Azure OpenAI.

Pricing on Microsoft Foundry

TypePrice (per 1M)
Input tokens$2.00
Output tokens$2.00

Capabilities

VisionMultimodalReasoningFunction CallingTool UseStructured OutputsCode Execution

About Arctic

Snowflake Arctic is an advanced large language model tailored for enterprise applications by Snowflake AI Research. It features an innovative Dense-MoE Hybrid transformer architecture, combining a 10 billion parameter dense transformer with a 128 x 3.66 billion parameter MoE MLP, totaling 480 billion parameters but utilizing only 17 billion actively. This structure optimizes efficiency, particularly for tasks like SQL generation, coding, and instruction following. The model's training spanned a diverse dataset of 3.5 trillion tokens, focusing on enterprise needs. Despite its capabilities, Arctic's deployment presents challenges due to its size, and it remains vulnerable to inaccuracies with unclear inputs. Open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license, it provides comprehensive access to its weights, code, and research findings 1 2 4 5.

Model Specs

Released2024-04-24
Parameters480B
Context4K
ArchitectureMixture of Experts

Provider

Microsoft Foundry
Microsoft Foundry

Microsoft

Redmond, Washington, United States