Microsoft has also secured a 750 million cloud deal with artificial intelligence start-up Perplexity; this will be a step forward in the artificial intelligence infrastructure race. This three-year contract will enable Perplexity to execute workloads on Microsoft Azure rather than depending on Amazon Web Services. The venture opens the startup to the Foundry platform and various frontier AI models of Microsoft. These are OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI offerings. The deal diversifies the cloud risk of Perplexity and enhances the enterprise AI positioning of Microsoft. Analysts consider the deal more of a strategic diversification move and not a total flight out of Amazon. Microsoft is still growing Azure as a popular model deployment and application development base across the globe.Azure has also been targeting AI-first businesses that are interested in scalable compute and model flexibility. The Foundry service package integrates applications that ease the implementation of the models of various vendors. Startups that need to be independent of single cloud environments are drawn to this structure. Microsoft has pre-established deals with OpenAI models. It also introduced Anthropic access in November in order to increase customer choice. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella remarked that customers desire to work across various models in every workload. The pitch of Azure is breadth and not exclusivity. This has been supported by the Perplexity deal. It demonstrates the self-belief of Microsoft to turn into a neutral platform for competing AI technologies.Perplexity intends to use search and answer engines installed on the Foundry built-in environment. The system allows teams to run OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI models with no discrete contracts. The spokesperson emphasised that the spending is not diverted from Amazon. Instead, the new setup gives redundancy and capacity. Multi-cloud strategies like these have become common with rapidly expanding AI firms with uncertain demand.The cloud industry has reached a competitive stage of intensifying rivalry, fuelled by the demand for generative AI. Hyperscalers are now competing on model ecosystems, as opposed to storage alone. The three companies (Microsoft, Amazon and Google) are interested in anchoring promising startups at an early stage. One of the more highly valued AI search challenges is perceived to be perplexity. It tends to reconsider the way people obtain information on the web. It is, however, under stiff competition from Google and OpenAI of Alphabet. These competitors have established huge capital and infrastructure agreements.