Experimenting with open-source models has become a core part of how innovative AI teams stay competitive: experimenting with the latest architectures and often fine-tuning on proprietary data to achieve lower latencies and cost.

Today, we’re happy to announce that the Gemma 4 family, Google DeepMind’s newest model family, is now available in Microsoft Foundry via the Hugging Face collection.

Azure customers can now discover, evaluate, and deploy Gemma 4 inside their Azure environment with the same policies they rely on for every other workload. Foundry is the only hyperscaler platform where developers can access OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemma, and over 11,000+ models under a single control plane. Through our close collaboration with Hugging Face, Gemma 4 joining that collection continues Microsoft’s push to bring customers the widest selection of models from any cloud – and fits in line with our enhanced investments in open-source development.

Frontier Intelligence, open-source weights

Released by Google DeepMind on April 2, 2026, Gemma 4 is built from the same research foundation as Gemini 3 and packaged as open weights under an Apache 2.0 license.

Key capabilities across the Gemma 4 family:

• Native multimodal: Text + image + video inputs across all sizes; analyze video by processing sequences of frames; audio input on edge models (E2B, E4B)
• Enhanced reasoning & coding capabilities: Multi-step planning, deep logic, and improvements in math and instruction-following enabling autonomous agents
• Trained for global deployment: Pretrained on 140+ languages with support for 35+ languages out of the box
• Long context: Context windows of up to 128K tokens (E2B/E4B) and 256K tokens (26B A4B/31B) allow developers to reason across extensive codebases, lengthy documents, or multi-session histories

Why choose Foundry?

Foundry is built to give developers breadth -- access to models from major model providers, open and proprietary, under one roof.

• Stay within Azure to work leading models. When you deploy through Foundry, models run inside your Azure environment and are subject to the same network policies, identity controls, and audit processes your organization already has in place.
• Managed online endpoints handle serving, scaling, and monitoring without manually setting up and managing the underlying infrastructure.
• Serverless deployment with Azure Container Apps allows developers to deploy and run containerized applications while reducing infrastructure management and saving costs.
• Gated model access integrates directly with Hugging Face user tokens, so models that require license acceptance stay compliant can be accessed without manual approvals.
• Foundry Local lets you run optimized Hugging Face models directly on your own hardware using the same model catalog and SDK patterns as your cloud deployments. Read the documentation here: https://aka.ms/foundrylocal and https://aka.ms/HF/foundrylocal
• Microsoft’s approach to Responsible AI is grounded in our AI principles of fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. Microsoft Foundry provides governance controls, monitoring, and evaluation capabilities to help organizations deploy new models responsibly in production environments.

What are teams building with Gemma 4 in Foundry

Gemma 4’s combination of multimodal input, agentic function calling, and long context offers a wide range of production use cases:

• Document intelligence: Processing PDFs, charts, invoices, and complex tables using native vision capabilities
• Multilingual enterprise apps: 140+ natively trained languages — ideal for multinational customer support, content platforms as well as language learning tools for grammar correction and writing practice
• Long-context analytics: Reasoning across entire codebases, legal documents, or multi-session conversation histories

Getting started

Try Gemma 4 in Microsoft Foundry today. New models from Hugging Face continue to roll out to Foundry on a regular basis through our ongoing collaboration. If there's a model you want to see added, let us know here. Stay connected to our developer community on Discord and stay up to date on what is new in Foundry through the Model Mondays series.