Microsoft has moved surprisingly quickly to bring R1 to its Azure customers.

Development on the first DeepSeek R1 clone might have started with the announcement of the Open-R1 open-source project.

Microsoft MSFT.O has made Chinese startup DeepSeek's R1 artificial intelligence model available on its Azure cloud computing platform and GitHub tool for developers, the U.S. company said on Wednesday. The AI model will be available in the model catalog on the platforms and will join more than 1,800 models that Microsoft is offering.

DeepSeek is causing havoc throughout the AI industry. U.S.-based tech companies that have heavily invested in AI saw their stocks take a tumble this week after the China-based startup released a new AI model on par with OpenAI's latest model, yet much cheaper to train — plus, DeepSeek made it free and open source.

OpenAI has accused Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek of using its proprietary models to train an open-source competitor.

Top White House advisers this week expressed alarm that China's DeepSeek may have benefited from a method that allegedly piggybacks off the advances of U.S. rivals called "distillation." The technique,

Deepseek collects similar data to American-based AI models, but Chinese laws could make that data more accessible to the government.

Chinese tech startup DeepSeek has come roaring into public view shortly after it released a model of its artificial intelligence service that seemingly is on par with U.S.-based competitors like ChatGPT,

Yet many in Silicon Valley believe the broad sell-off is an overreaction to DeepSeek’s latest model, which they argue could spur wider adoption and utility of AI by radically lowering the technology’s cost,