Sovereign Private Cloud: Bringing more choice and control to AI and cloud infrastructure

Microsoft

Oct 20, 2026

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Digital sovereignty is essential for organizations as they modernize critical infrastructure and bring AI into more sensitive and regulated environments. We’re hearing from our customers in Europe and beyond that they want to take advantage of cloud and AI innovation while maintaining greater control over where their data, applications, and infrastructure operate.

Microsoft Sovereign Private Cloud, built on Azure Local, extends cloud capabilities into customer-controlled environments, helping organizations meet sovereignty, regulatory, and operational requirements while continuing to modernize applications, infrastructure, data, and AI.

At Microsoft Frontier Tour stops this month in London, Paris and Cologne, we’re showcasing exciting new capabilities that expand what our customers can achieve with Sovereign Private Cloud and Azure Local. These advancements range from running frontier AI models locally to strengthening resiliency and workload isolation, enhancing security, and improving developer productivity.

Run AI where your data lives with Foundry Local

Foundry Local, generally available on Azure Local at Ignite, brings the Microsoft Foundry stack into customer-controlled environments, extending AI capabilities to on-premises infrastructure. Organizations can deploy and run AI models close to their data, enabling local inference while maintaining greater control over their infrastructure, data, and operations.

With Foundry Local, organizations can bring the Foundry experience to connected and disconnected environments, giving them greater flexibility in where and how they deploy AI. This enables customers to bring AI to locations and workloads where cloud connectivity, data residency, latency, or operational requirements make local processing important.

We’re continuing to expand the Foundry Local model catalog, giving organizations greater choice in the models they can deploy and run locally. Developers can select models based on the needs of their applications while keeping inference close to their data, applications, and operations.

Beyond model inference, Foundry Local is expanding to support agentic AI scenarios on Azure Local into public preview. Agentic Retrieval provides local data ingestion, indexing and search, along with agents, tool calling, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, and a built-in chat experience with citations. Together, these capabilities enable developers to build AI applications that can use locally available enterprise knowledge, interact through conversational experiences, and connect agents with tools through MCP. This extends Foundry Local from local model inference to a broader foundation for building grounded AI applications and agents in customer-controlled environments.

Learn more about Foundry Local on Azure Local.

Strengthen resilience and operational flexibility across Azure Local environments

Sovereign environments need to remain resilient and adaptable while supporting different teams, tenants, and workloads across shared infrastructure. We’re bringing more choice over how and where our customers can operate infrastructure based on their sovereignty, connectivity, and operational requirements.

Azure Local is expanding the ways organizations can operate in their environments. The ability to move from connected to disconnected Azure Local operations is entering public preview, enabling organizations to rehome Azure-connected infrastructure and workloads to a fully disconnected Azure Local environment while maintaining operational continuity and governance. The process includes safeguards such as phased execution, user approval stages, and secure environment back-ups that ensure the safe and accurate migration of both infrastructure resources and workloads to the Azure Local disconnected environment. This empowers customers to more easily transition their environments to Azure Local disconnected operations and meet their evolving operational requirements related to connectivity to the cloud and data sovereignty.

Multitenancy, coming soon to Azure Local, provides greater flexibility provides greater flexibility in how organizations use and allocate shared infrastructure. Through logical isolation, organizations can consolidate workloads and make more efficient use of available capacity while maintaining separation across tenants, teams, and workloads. Initial access will be limited to qualified customer opportunities.

Together, these capabilities help organizations build Sovereign Private Cloud environments that are more resilient, adaptable, and capable of supporting a diverse range of workloads and operating models.

Protect sensitive workloads with confidential computing

Protecting data at rest and in transit is critical. For highly sensitive workloads, organizations may also need stronger protections while data is actively being processed.

With confidential virtual machines on Azure Local, now generally available, organizations can extend confidential computing protections to customer-controlled infrastructure. Confidential virtual machines provide hardware-encrypted memory and hardware-based isolation between the virtual machine, hypervisor, and host management environment, helping protect sensitive data while it is in use.

Hardware-rooted attestation provides additional assurance by enabling the integrity of the platform and workload to be verified before sensitive data or keys are released. Customers can also use integrity protection for the guest operating system to help protect the OS disk and boot chain from unauthorized modification.

For organizations running regulated, sensitive, or mission-critical workloads, these capabilities provide an additional layer of protection within Sovereign Private Cloud. By combining customer-controlled infrastructure with hardware-enforced isolation and attestation, organizations can strengthen protection for sensitive workloads while maintaining greater control over where their data and applications run.

Learn more about confidential virtual machines on Azure Local.

Bring development and DevOps into the sovereign boundary with GitHub Enterprise Local

Sovereignty extends beyond production infrastructure. Organizations also need to consider where applications are developed and how development environments are operated.

GitHub Enterprise Local, entering general availability at Ignite, brings GitHub Enterprise Server into Azure Local and Sovereign Private Cloud environments. This enables organizations to support local development and DevOps while keeping development environments within their sovereign operational boundary.

Delivered as a prebuilt virtual appliance on Azure Local, it keeps repositories, metadata, CI/CD workflows, and development artifacts within the organization’s infrastructure and security boundaries. Developers can use familiar GitHub capabilities including private repositories, pull requests, code reviews, issues, GitHub Actions with self-hosted runners, GitHub Packages, and GitHub Advanced Security, while organizations maintain control over identity, networking, security policies, upgrades, and administration. GitHub Enterprise Local supports both connected and fully disconnected environments.

GitHub Enterprise Local supports AI-enabled developer experiences across connectivity models. In connected environments, developers can continue using cloud-connected capabilities such as GitHub Copilot, while in disconnected environments, Foundry Local on Azure Local can provide locally hosted AI models for AI-assisted development scenarios.

The general availability of GitHub Enterprise Local expands Microsoft’s Sovereign Private Cloud platform beyond infrastructure and workloads to the tools developers use to build and manage applications.

Learn more about GitHub Enterprise Local.

Run critical data workloads locally

At FabCon, we announced the general availability of SQL Server on Azure Local across connected and disconnected environments, expanding the options organizations have to run critical data workloads where they need greater control over their data and infrastructure.

We are continuing to expand the data services available on Sovereign Private Cloud with DocumentDB on Azure Local and Blob Storage on Azure Local, both entering public preview at Ignite.

DocumentDB on Azure Local brings a MongoDB-compatible, open-source document database to customer-controlled environments, giving organizations more flexibility to run document and JSON workloads locally.
Blob Storage on Azure Local provides cloud-native object storage for unstructured data while keeping the data local, giving organizations more flexibility to store and access data within sovereign environments.

Together with SQL Server, these capabilities expand Azure Local beyond infrastructure to support a broader data estate across relational databases, document databases, and object storage. For Sovereign Private Cloud customers, that means greater flexibility to modernize applications and data while keeping critical workloads and data in customer-controlled environments.