Microsoft will reduce GitHub's independence and move its servers to Azure (www.neowin.net)

Microsoft is moving GitHub off its own data centers and onto Azure over the next 24 months, with the "main body" of the migration targeted to finish within about a year. The change — announced internally by GitHub CTO Vladimir Fedorov and confirmed by COO Kyle Daigle — was prompted by a major capacity constraint in the North Virginia region and framed as necessary to scale for AI-driven workloads like Copilot. GitHub’s leadership and operations are being folded into Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, teams will pause some new feature launches to prioritize the infrastructure work, and employees are being encouraged to switch from Slack to Microsoft Teams to simplify cross-company coordination. For the AI/ML community this is significant because it directly ties GitHub’s scale and AI capabilities to Azure’s infrastructure and Microsoft’s CoreAI priorities. Technical implications include faster access to compute and storage capacity needed for model serving, data pipelines and real-time developer-assist features, but also migration complexity (re-architecting services, data transfer, compliance and data-residency concerns) and a loss of platform independence that could affect open-source governance and vendor lock-in. In short, the move should accelerate GitHub’s ability to support large-scale AI workflows while concentrating operational control and technical dependencies inside Microsoft’s cloud and AI stack.