Microsoft Eyes DeepSeek V4 for Copilot Cowork: What Azure Hosting Cannot Fix

Microsoft launched Copilot Cowork for enterprises on June 16, 2026, with usage-based pricing. The company is evaluating a Microsoft-hosted version of DeepSeek V4 as a cheaper engine. A decision on DeepSeek or an open-source alternative is expected within weeks. The move targets the high costs of agentic AI at scale. Usage-based pricing reflects sustainability concerns for large enterprise deployments. Agentic coding tasks can consume far more tokens than standard prompts. DeepSeek V4’s advantage lies in Mixture-of-Experts routing. MoE directs work to select experts, reducing unnecessary compute.