What to Expect from Microsoft Build 2020

Tomorrow morning Microsoft Build kicks off, and this year it’s unlike any Build before it: no Seattle convention center, no crowded expo hall, no free swag lines. Instead it’s a fully digital, 48-hour event running May 19-20, and — notably — free to attend. If you’ve been priced out of Build in past years by ticket costs and travel budgets, this is your chance to watch the keynotes and sessions from wherever you are.

Going into it, the expected focus areas are pretty much what you’d guess for a developer-first Microsoft event: Windows developer tooling and Azure updates. I’d expect the usual cadence of incremental but meaningful announcements — updates to the developer experience across Visual Studio and VS Code, progress on Windows Subsystem for Linux, and whatever the current state of Windows Terminal and PowerToys happens to be. Azure will almost certainly get a chunk of stage time too, likely touching on containers, serverless, and the ongoing push to make Azure the default backend for anything built on Microsoft’s stack.

The OpenAI angle is the one to watch

The more interesting thread this year, at least to me, is what Microsoft says about its deepening relationship with OpenAI. Microsoft has already put real money behind this — funding a dedicated Azure supercomputer specifically built to train OpenAI’s models. That’s not a small line item; it signals Microsoft wants to be the infrastructure layer underneath whatever OpenAI ships next, rather than just a cloud vendor with a logo on a slide.

For developers, the open question is how much of this shows up as something you can actually build with at Build, versus stays in the realm of “strategic partnership” messaging. Companies love to announce partnerships months before there’s an SDK or API surface attached to them. But given how much compute Microsoft has apparently committed, I’d expect at least some concrete detail on what the arrangement looks like technically — whether that’s Azure-hosted AI services, new APIs, or just architectural detail on the supercomputer itself.

It’s worth stepping back and noting how much this mirrors the broader industry moment: cloud providers are increasingly betting that AI research partnerships, not just raw compute rental, are what differentiates one cloud from another. If Microsoft can position Azure as “the cloud where OpenAI’s models live,” that’s a meaningfully different pitch than competing purely on VM pricing.

None of this is confirmed beyond the broad strokes — a free digital format, Windows and Azure updates, and more detail on the OpenAI partnership. But if you’re a developer with any interest in where large-scale AI training infrastructure is headed, or you just want to see what a big-name conference looks like fully virtual for the first time, it’s worth carving out some time this week. Worst case, you learn what’s new in the Windows dev toolchain. Best case, you get a real look at how seriously Microsoft is taking the OpenAI bet.