Microsoft is turning to its biggest cloud rival, Amazon, to help address capacity issues on its GitHub coding platform following a series of AI-driven outages, according to two people familiar with the plans. GitHub, which Microsoft acquired in 2018, is a popular place for engineers to store and manage code, and collaborate on projects. As an independent company, GitHub mostly operated its own data centers, but Microsoft had planned to move the coding platform entirely to its Azure cloud service by 2027. Now, a boom in AI demand is forcing Microsoft to lean on Amazon. AI coding tools have made it easier for developers to write more software. That has swamped GitHub with a flood of new code, straining its compute resources. GitHub commits — records of code changes that serve as a proxy for development activity — were on pace to reach 14 billion in 2026, up from 1 billion in 2025, Chief Operating Officer Kyle Daigle wrote on X in April. To handle this surge in activity, Microsoft is adding extra computing capacity via Amazon Web Services, the people familiar said. The move is notable because Microsoft is battling AWS for market share in the cloud market. Giving an arch rival more business, rather than addressing GitHub needs via its own Azure cloud service, is likely not an ideal move for Microsoft. However, AI-driven demand is so strong that other big tech companies are having to make similar deals. Earlier this month, SpaceX and Google disclosed a new deal in which Google will pay SpaceX $920 million a month for AI compute capacity from October 2026 to June 2029. That emerged just two months after Google's own cloud business agreed to sell AI compute capacity to Anthropic. GitHub's 'multi-cloud' strategy A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed GitHub is tapping multiple cloud providers but declined to comment on any Amazon involvement. 'The incredible spike in agentic development that began late last year has tested our infrastructure's limits,' the spokesperson said. To meet this demand, Microsoft is 'both accelerating our move to Azure and continuing to explore a multi-cloud strategy to ensure we have the future capacity, compute elasticity and horizontal scale required to support continued growth.' An Amazon spokesperson said the company doesn't comment on individual clients, but said 'customers choose AWS because they need global infrastructure that performs reliably, securely, and efficiently at scale, and we're committed to providing the best performance no matter the workload.' Keeping services running While these deals might seem strange, the main goal is to keep popular services running for customers — no matter who you have to work with. For Microsoft, that's likely the situation with GitHub, which has suffered dozens of major outages in 2026. Mitchell Hashimoto, cofounder of startup HashiCorp, in April wrote that GitHub was 'no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day.' GitHub had an early lead among engineers. Lately, though, it has faced more competition from AI tools such as Cursor and Anthropic's Claude Code. Microsoft recently projected that its capital expenditures for the 2026 calendar year will reach $190 billion, largely to expand data center capacity. However, many data center projects are delayed, and Microsoft has a host of other important AI projects and businesses that it must support with compute capacity. In an internal meeting late last year, a Microsoft executive spoke about needing to overhaul GitHub to compete with Cursor and Claude Code, according to audio reviewed by Business Insider.

Source: Business Insider

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