Anyscale and Microsoft have announced a strategic partnership to integrate the open-source distributed compute framework Ray into Azure, creating a new AI compute service co-engineered to meet the needs of enterprises building AI-native platforms. This collaboration aims to address the growing complexity and scale of AI workloads, which have outpaced traditional computing architectures. By leveraging Ray's flexibility and Azure's cloud capabilities, the partnership seeks to enable enterprises to efficiently manage multimodal data pipelines, reinforcement learning, and distributed inference across diverse hardware without the burden of orchestrating complex systems. This service, integrated with Azure Kubernetes Service, provides a unified, secure environment for AI development and deployment, empowering enterprises to innovate with reduced operational overhead. The partnership signifies a shift from API-first to code-first AI development, granting enterprises the control and resources needed to create custom AI models and platforms.