Microsoft Shares Rise as Cheaper AI Model Released Through Foundry

Microsoft shares rose by approximately 0.15% to $513.585 on October 1, following the release of GPT-6.1 Sol through Foundry. The new production model aims to make AI agents cheaper to run, potentially stimulating more cloud consumption.

The pricing model for global short-context usage is set at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached inputs costing $0.10. Longer-context workloads raise these rates to $4 for inputs and $15 for outputs, while regional data-zone deployments add premiums.

Microsoft's model pricing puts workload size and deployment location at the center of a customer's bill, making it crucial for customers to deploy more agents, give them more work, and buy computing, storage, and databases behind them.