Fresh off a $100 million funding round, Hugging Face, which provides hosted AI services and a community-driven portal for AI tools and data sets, today announced a new product in collaboration with Microsoft. Called Hugging Face Endpoints on Azure, Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue described it as a way to turn Hugging Face-developed AI models into "scalable production solutions." "The mission of Hugging Face is to democratize good machine learning," Delangue said in a press release. "We're striving to help every developer and organization build high-quality, machine learning-powered applications that have a positive impact on society and businesses. With Hugging Face Endpoints, we've made it simpler than ever to deploy state-of-the-art models, and we can't wait to see what Azure customers will build with them." The demand for AI remains high.

Dataiku announced that it is now available through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, an online store providing applications and services for use on Azure. This availability opens the door for Azure customers to take advantage of Dataiku's easy-to-use visual interface to build data pipelines, prepare data, and build and deploy machine learning models on their cloud. Azure customers can now purchase Dataiku – a leader in AI and support for elastic cloud computing – using their Azure cloud budget and relationship, removing the barrier of new contracts or legal hassles when starting their journey to enterprise AI at scale. "AI and cloud really go together," said Florian Douetteau, CEO of Dataiku. "With Dataiku in the Azure Marketplace, we think more organizations will be able to leverage the power of AI on the cloud to make smarter, faster decisions, deliver better customer experiences, and automate key business processes."

At the Microsoft Build conference on Monday, the company kicked off a new cloud offering that would provide machine learning resources to cloud customers using Intel FPGA-accelerated servers. "I think this is a first step in making the FPGAs more of a general-purpose platform for customers," said Mark Russinovich, chief technical officer for Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform. The technology is being offered as "preview," which apparently means only a limited set of capabilities and allocations are available. Also, at this point, only customers with accounts in the East US 2 region will be able to access the platform. This represents the commercialization of Microsoft's Project Brainwave, an FPGA-based machine learning platform the company developed over the past year.

At the Microsoft Build conference on Monday, the company kicked off a new cloud offering that would provide machine learning resources to cloud customers using Intel FPGA-accelerated servers. "I think this is a first step in making the FPGAs more of a general-purpose platform for customers," said Mark Russinovich, chief technical officer for Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform. The technology is being offered as "preview," which apparently means only a limited set of capabilities and allocations are available. Also, at this point, only customers with accounts in the East US 2 region will be able to access the platform. This represents the commercialization of Microsoft's Project Brainwave, an FPGA-based machine learning platform the company developed over the past year.

Two key letters show up throughout Microsoft's major reorganization announcement this morning: AI. Artificial intelligence will get even more emphasis as part of the company's reshuffling of leadership and engineering divisions. In a memo to employees laying out the reorg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called out AI as one of the technologies that will "shape the next phase of innovation." He continues: "AI capabilities are rapidly advancing across perception and cognition fueled by data and knowledge of the world." The company's AI Research division, formed two years ago under the leadership of Harry Shum, remains intact, while the revamped cloud division will have a significant AI component as well.

Nordcloud, Europe's fastest growing public cloud provider and the Nordic market-leader has teamed up with Microsoft to boost the spread of AI across the continent. Nordcloud helps customers to complete AI projects faster and at lower costs with the use of Microsoft Azure. AI projects with complex deep learning problems consume vast amounts of computing capacity and traditional hosting solutions are not sufficiently agile to meet this demand. Nordcloud has wide experience of working with the Azure platform and developing innovative services with and for its clients that use the power of AI. The company's past projects have included helping customers with AI related challenges such as recommendation engines, classification and natural language processing.