Satya Nadella: DeepSeek is the new bar for Microsoft’s AI success

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella moved quickly to get DeepSeek’s R1 deployed on Azure in January. Nadella appeared to have anticipated the rise of a breakthrough like R1, and now he says a new bar has been set for the company’s own AI work.

Speaking at an employee-only town hall last month, Nadella and his senior leadership team discussed DeepSeek and the company’s own $80 billion investment into AI at length, answering questions from employees about the giant spend and its effect on…