Microsoft Turns to Rival Amazon to Keep GitHub Running Amid AI Surge

Microsoft is adding Amazon Web Services capacity to GitHub after AI-driven development growth overwhelmed its existing infrastructure. The move marks an unusual step for the tech giant, which owns one of the world's largest cloud platforms, Azure, yet now needs help from its biggest cloud rival to keep GitHub stable for the millions of developers who rely on it daily.

AI Agents Are Flooding GitHub With Code

The numbers behind GitHub's infrastructure crisis are staggering. Pull requests opened by AI agents, which are automated programs that can write and submit code without human intervention, surged from roughly four million in September 2025 to more than 17 million by March 2026. The platform is on track to handle 14 billion commits this year, up from approximately one billion in 2025. That explosive growth, driven largely by tools like GitHub Copilot and third-party AI coding assistants, has pushed GitHub's backend systems past their limits.

The strain became impossible to ignore in May 2026, when GitHub logged nine separate service incidents in a single month. Developers worldwide experienced outages and slowdowns that disrupted workflows and delayed projects. Microsoft acknowledged the problem and confirmed it is accelerating GitHub's migration to Azure while simultaneously tapping AWS for additional cloud capacity.

Why Microsoft Chose a Rival's Cloud

The decision to use Amazon's infrastructure highlights a practical reality of the current AI boom. Even the second-largest cloud provider in the world cannot build data centers fast enough to meet soaring demand. Microsoft has faced delays in its own data center expansion, and the company determined that waiting was not an option when GitHub's reliability was on the line.

Industry analysts say the move reflects a broader trend across the tech sector. Companies including Google and Anthropic have recently signed massive computing deals to secure enough processing power for AI workloads. Microsoft's choice to go multi-cloud for GitHub suggests that no single provider can keep pace with the infrastructure demands that AI development now creates.

The situation underscores how quickly AI-powered coding tools have reshaped software development. What began as a productivity boost has become an infrastructure challenge that even the largest tech companies struggle to manage on their own.