Mercury lands on Azure AI Foundry for private-instance deployment

Inception's November 2025 Mercury release on Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry gave customers a way to provision the language model within their Azure infrastructure. The deployment instructions describe selecting model capacity and managing access through Azure's existing controls. They also distinguish two costs: a Mercury software license, listed at $0.78 per hour in the announcement, and separately billed computing resources. The useful change was an Azure deployment option with its own operating costs and configuration, rather than simply another address for the public API. Deployment announcement