Gemma 4 now available in Microsoft Foundry
Summary
Google DeepMind's Gemma 4 model family is now available in Microsoft Foundry via the Hugging Face collection, enhancing Azure customers' ability to discover, evaluate, and deploy open-source models within their existing Azure environments. Released on April 2, 2026, Gemma 4 is built on the same research foundation as Gemini 3, offered with open weights under an Apache 2.0 license. Key capabilities include native multimodal input (text, image, video, and audio for edge models), enhanced reasoning and coding, training on over 140 languages, and long context windows up to 256K tokens. Microsoft Foundry provides a unified control plane for various models, managed online endpoints, serverless deployment with Azure Container Apps, and integrated gated model access, ensuring compliance and cost efficiency.
Key takeaway
For AI teams seeking to integrate advanced open-source models into their Azure workflows, you should explore Gemma 4 in Microsoft Foundry. This integration allows you to leverage its multimodal capabilities, enhanced reasoning, and long context windows within your existing security and governance frameworks, potentially reducing infrastructure management overhead and accelerating deployment of sophisticated AI applications like document intelligence or multilingual platforms.
Key insights
Gemma 4, a multimodal open-weight model, is now available in Microsoft Foundry, offering extensive capabilities for enterprise AI.
Principles
- Open-source models drive AI innovation.
- Unified platforms simplify model deployment.
- Governance controls are crucial for responsible AI.
Method
Microsoft Foundry enables discovery, evaluation, and deployment of models like Gemma 4 within Azure, integrating with existing policies and offering managed online endpoints and serverless deployment.
In practice
- Process PDFs and charts using Gemma 4's vision.
- Develop multilingual enterprise applications.
- Analyze large codebases with long context windows.
Topics
- Gemma 4
- Microsoft Foundry
- Hugging Face
- Multimodal AI
- Long Context Models
Best for: NLP Engineer, Computer Vision Engineer, CTO, AI Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, MLOps Engineer
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