Microsoft at NVIDIA GTC: AI Agents, Physical AI and More

Microsoft has announced new capabilities across Microsoft Foundry, Azure AI infrastructure and physical AI to help its customers operate AI reliably at enterprise scale.

Working closely with NVIDIA, Microsoft aims to help organisations move from experimentation to production, building secure, safe AI agents that run across cloud, hybrid and sovereign environments.

Foundry tools unlock production-ready AI agents

The new tools in Foundry enable users to build, deploy and operate production-ready AI agents on NVIDIA accelerators – powerful, specialised computer chips that make AI work incredibly fast and efficiently – and open NVIDIA Nemotron models, which act as starting templates so users don’t have to develop the AI’s core intelligence from scratch. 

The Foundry Agent Service and Observability in Foundry Control Plane are now generally available, allowing users to build and operate AI agents.

Foundry Agent Service is a tool that helps teams quickly create AI agents that can reason, plan and act by connecting to and working will all the software, information and business processes a company already uses.

Once created, Foundry Control Plane provides the developer end-to-end visibility into agent behaviour with a complete view of exactly what the AI is doing. 

Plus, the Voice Live API integration with Foundry Agent Service, in public preview, enables developers to build voice-first, multimodal, real-time agentic experiences.

Azure AI powered by NVIDIA

The new Azure AI infrastructure is optimised for inference-heavy, reasoning-based workloads, including the first hyperscale cloud to power on next-generation NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 systems. 

Yina Arenas, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Foundry, says: “Microsoft’s AI infrastructure approach is engineered to seamlessly bring next-generation NVIDIA systems into Azure data centres that are designed for power, cooling networking and rapid generational upgrades.

“This allows our customers to move with speed and agility and stay at the leading edge from generation to generation.

“In less than a year, we’ve deployed hundreds of thousands of liquid-cooled Grace Blackwell GPUs across our global data centre footprint, and now we are excited to be the first hyperscale cloud to power on NVIDIA’s newest Vera Rubin NVL72 in our labs. 

“Over the next few months, Vera Rubin NVL72 will be rolled out into our modern, liquid-cooled Azure data centres.”

Bolstering industrial physical AI

Microsoft and NVIDIA are also working together to bring industrial physical AI to joint customers. 

This work centres on NVIDIA Physical AI Data Factory Blueprint, with Foundry as the platform for hosting and operating physical AI systems on Azure.

Developers can use the integrated blueprint to build, train and operate physical AI and robotics workflows that connect physical assets, simulation and cloud training environments into repeatable pipelines.

Plus, Microsoft and NVIDIA are deepening the integration between Microsoft Fabric and NVIDIA Omniverse libraries, connecting live operational data with physically accurate digital twins and simulation.

This lets organisations in manufacturing, logistics and other heavy operations move beyond simple dashboards and alerts. Instead of merely notifying a human that something is wrong, the system automatically triggers and coordinates a precise, optimal AI-driven action across all machines, facilities and processes, resulting in faster decisions and minimised human error.

“Whether powering always-on agents, scaling next-generation AI infrastructure or deploying intelligent systems in factories, energy facilities and sovereign environments, Microsoft and NVIDIA are helping customers move faster from insight to action,” says Arenas.

Microsoft has worked with NVIDIA for years to integrate hardware, software and infrastructure to power AI breakthroughs.

These updates were revealed at NVIDIA GTC 2026, taking place between 16 and 19 March in San Jose, California.