REDMOND, Wash., and EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — May 2026 — Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) and OdysseyAI, Inc. ("Odyssey") today announced a strategic partnership to bring orbital compute to Microsoft Azure. Through the partnership, Azure customers will gain direct access to a fundamentally new class of compute, engineered beyond traditional architectures and custom-built to thrive in the space environment, and can begin pre-booking capacity through the Azure Marketplace today, ahead of Odyssey's first deployments to Low Earth Orbit.
The global data center industry is meeting an unprecedented surge in AI demand against the hard physical limits of terrestrial infrastructure: constrained power grids, multi-year interconnect queues, water-intensive cooling, and land pressure in the regions where customers most need capacity. Odyssey is not a traditional data center relocated to space. It is a new class of compute, custom-built from the ground up to thrive in the space environment, drawing on unlimited solar energy, rejecting heat radiatively into deep space, and connecting back to Earth through high-bandwidth optical links, with capabilities that extend beyond what conventional architectures are able to deliver on Earth. For Azure customers, the result is access to a new tier of cloud capacity that is inherently more sustainable, faster to scale, and uniquely sovereign by virtue of where it lives.
"This partnership represents the next frontier in cloud infrastructure. As our customers push the boundaries of what is possible with AI, Microsoft is committed to delivering capacity that is sustainable, sovereign, and uncompromising in performance. Odyssey extends Azure into a domain that no terrestrial data center can match, and gives our customers an option that does not compete with communities on Earth for power, water, or land. We could not be more excited to bring this to the Azure Marketplace."
— Valerie Bertele, AI Partnerships, Microsoft
"We're excited to be bringing Odyssey's new space-optimized compute capabilities to Azure customers. AI's compute demand is outpacing what Earth's grid can sustainably deliver. The structural advantages of orbit are clear: abundant solar, radiative cooling into deep space, and headroom to scale that isn't bounded by interconnect queues, watersheds, or land. But just lifting conventional compute into orbit doesn't capture that opportunity. At Odyssey, we're launching a new class of compute made for the space environment — not just to survive it, but to be made better by it. We're proud to bring those capabilities to Azure customers, and grateful to have Microsoft alongside us as we lift the AI frontier off-planet."
— Abood Hannoon, Chief Executive Officer, Odyssey
The partnership directly extends several of Microsoft's most important strategic priorities. It supports Microsoft's 2030 commitments to be carbon negative and water positive by adding a class of compute capacity with effectively zero water consumption and a path to dramatically lower power-usage overhead than the most efficient terrestrial facilities. It compresses time-to-capacity for AI workloads by sidestepping multi-year grid and transformer queues. It expands Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty into an entirely new domain — a sovereign location, in space, for customers whose data and compute need to live beyond conventional jurisdictional boundaries. And it gives Azure customers a future-proof path to capacity at the scale that frontier AI is expected to require.
From day one, customers will be able to discover, evaluate, and pre-book orbital compute capacity directly from the Azure Marketplace using their existing Azure accounts and procurement workflows. Odyssey's capacity will be available alongside the rest of the Azure portfolio, with the same enterprise-grade access controls, billing, and compliance that customers already rely on. Capacity will come online in waves as Odyssey deploys its constellation, beginning with the launch of its flagship vehicle in early 2027 and scaling rapidly thereafter.
The two companies will share additional details, including initial customer pilots, capacity tiers, and roadmap milestones, in the months ahead.
About Odyssey
Odyssey is a venture-backed orbital supercomputing company headquartered in El Segundo, California. Odyssey designs, builds, and operates full-stack space supercomputers that deliver compute density and energy efficiency unattainable on Earth. The company's mission is to lift the frontier of computation off-planet and introduce new forms of space-native compute to make orbital compute a first-class capability for the world's most demanding commercial and government workloads. Driving Odyssey is a world-class team of machine intelligence scientists and engineers developing novel algorithms and processing architectures optimized for an entirely new class of compute to deliver multi-domain intelligence with uncompromising efficiency across the depth and breadth of workloads that define the frontier of Artificial Superintelligence. Learn more at www.odysseyintelligence.ai.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
Media Contacts
Microsoft Media Relations
WE Communications for Microsoft
(425) 638-7777
rapidresponse@wecommunications.com
Microsoft, Azure, and the Microsoft Azure Marketplace are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.