Expanding Open Model Choice in Microsoft Foundry with New DeepSeek and NVIDIA Nemotron Models

Open models are driving a new wave of AI innovation, giving organizations more freedom to choose the models that best fit their requirements for performance, cost, latency, customization, and governance. As the open model ecosystem evolves rapidly, developers want access to the latest innovations without being locked into a single model provider or deployment approach.

That's why Microsoft Foundry continues to invest in bringing leading open models to a unified platform. Our goal is simple: help developers discover, evaluate, and deploy the right model for each workload while benefiting from consistent tooling, enterprise-grade governance, and flexible deployment options.

Today we're announcing several additions to the Foundry models catalog:

• DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 as a Direct from Azure model and through Fireworks on Foundry
• NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning through Fireworks on Foundry and through the Hugging Face collection on Foundry

More choices for agentic AI and enterprise applications

Many of today's most popular open models are advancing rapidly, particularly for agentic workflows, code generation, reasoning, document understanding, and workflow automation.

For example, DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 introduces improvements in coding-agent performance, tool use, and workflow automation, making it well suited for AI assistants and agentic applications.

Similarly, NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is designed for agentic workloads with capabilities such as tool calling, long-context processing, multilingual support, structured outputs, and multi-step task execution.

One model, multiple deployment choices

As the model ecosystem grows, customers increasingly want flexibility in how they consume models.

With these launches, developers can access models through different pathways in Foundry depending on their requirements:

Direct from Azure

DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 builds on the previously available DeepSeek V4 Flash model with substantial improvements for agentic applications. Compared to the prior Flash release on Foundry, it delivers strong gains across coding, tool-use, and automation benchmarks, including a more than 7x improvement on DeepSWE (7.3 to 54.4) and a 21-point increase on Terminal Bench (61.8 to 82.7), helping developers build more capable coding agents and workflow automation solutions

Direct from Azure models are billed through your Azure subscription, covered by Azure service-level agreements, and supported by Microsoft.

Fireworks on Foundry

The same models are available through more than one path, so teams can pick the consumption model that fits the workload rather than the other way around. Fireworks deployments run inside your Foundry project with Azure governance and access controls, on pay-per-token or provisioned throughput. Start serverless while you evaluate, move to reserved capacity when traffic gets predictable. Same path brings your own fine-tuned weights (BYOM) into the same catalog and endpoint as everything else. Available through Fireworks on Foundry starting today:

• DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731
• NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning

Table: Fireworks on Foundry Models Pricing and Deployments*

* Global Provisioned deployments are billed at USD 1.00 per Provisioned Throughput Unit (PTU) per hour, and US Data Zone Provisioned deployments are billed at USD 1.10 per PTU per hour. Provisioned deployments are billed based on the number of deployed PTUs, rather than the number of tokens consumed.

Hugging Face collection on Foundry

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is also available through the Hugging Face collection in Foundry, making the model compatible with managed compute. Developers can deploy it on dedicated GPU capacity with a Foundry-managed runtime, then choose the deployment template, accelerator family, and scaling behavior that fit their workload. This flexibility can help teams lower inference costs by aligning compute capacity and scaling with application demand rather than using a one-size-fits-all deployment.

Choosing the format that fits your workload

Many of the models that come in through our Hugging Face collection are optimized for specific hardware. NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning comes in two different formats BF16 and NVFP4 allowing developers the ability to make an intentional tradeoff among customization, inference speed, memory use, hardware coverage, and model fidelity:

A unified experience for model evaluation and deployment

While the number of available models continues to grow, the developer experience shouldn't become more complicated.

Microsoft Foundry provides a single platform where teams can discover models, compare options, evaluate them against their own datasets, and deploy them with enterprise-grade governance and management capabilities. This allows developers to focus on finding the right model for their scenario rather than managing fragmented tooling.

Get started

Explore the latest additions in the Microsoft Foundry model catalog:

• DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 Direct from Azure and through Fireworks on Foundry
• NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning through Fireworks on Foundry and Hugging Face collection on Foundry BF16 and NVFP4

As the open model ecosystem continues to evolve, Microsoft Foundry remains committed to providing customers with broad model choice, flexible deployment options, and the tools needed to move from experimentation to production.

Helpful resources:

Foundry Models sold by Azure - Microsoft Foundry | Microsoft Learn

Fireworks models on Microsoft Foundry - Microsoft Foundry | Microsoft Learn

Hugging Face models in Microsoft Foundry (preview) - Microsoft Foundry | Microsoft Learn