Mercedes has added another heavyweight name to its partner roster on the eve of its 2026 car reveal, confirming a multi-year deal with Microsoft that underlines how aggressively the tech sector is positioning itself around Formula 1’s next rules cycle.
The Brackley team will pull the covers off its new W17 on Thursday, and the timing isn’t accidental: in a season where everyone will be selling “next generation” as hard as they’re building it, a Microsoft badge carries a different sort of heft. Mercedes confirmed the agreement on Thursday morning after reports a day earlier suggested the deal was close, with estimates placing it at roughly $60m per year. If that figure is in the right ballpark, it slots into the upper tier of F1 sponsorships — behind Mercedes’ own title partnership with Petronas (reported at $75m annually) and Red Bull’s title backing from Oracle (reported at $100m).
What’s striking isn’t just the size, but the direction of travel. F1’s commercial ecosystem has long been awash with technology branding, but the past few years have seen a sharper shift from logo-first partnerships to arrangements that are sold internally as operational tools: cloud computing, AI, security, data pipelines, collaboration platforms — the kind of stuff that rarely makes a highlights reel but increasingly determines how quickly a team finds performance and how consistently it avoids unforced errors.
Toto Wolff leaned into that framing when Mercedes announced the deal, pitching Microsoft as a performance partner rather than simply a sponsor.
“Our sport is driven by those who lead through innovation,” Wolff said. “We are delighted to partner with Microsoft, one of the world’s foremost technology leaders, whose name is synonymous with groundbreaking innovation.
“This partnership also reflects our commitment to staying at the forefront of performance and progress. By putting Microsoft’s technology at the centre of how we operate as a team, we will create faster insights, smarter collaboration and new ways of working as we look ahead to the next generation in F1.”
Microsoft, for its part, has made it clear the agreement is built around its cloud and enterprise AI offering — the sort of language that’s become standard in corporate announcements, but also a fair reflection of where modern F1 teams actually win and lose time.
“This partnership puts Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise AI technologies at the heart of racing performance, where milliseconds matter and data determines outcomes,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president and chief commercial officer of Microsoft. “Together with the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team, we are harnessing data and turning it into real-time intelligence that powers faster decisions, smarter strategies and sustained competitive advantage both on and off the track.”
Mercedes commercial chief Richard Sanders added that Microsoft technology is already “central” to how the team operates, and suggested the partnership formalises — and expands — a relationship that had effectively been in place behind the scenes.
“It is a privilege to welcome Microsoft into the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team partner ecosystem,” Sanders said. “Microsoft’s technology already plays a central role in how we operate as a business, and this partnership opens new opportunities to innovate as we look toward the next era of technological development.”
There’s also a broader context around Mercedes’ ownership and partner mix that makes the Microsoft move feel like part of a deliberate pattern, not a one-off. Wolff sold a portion of his shares in the team last year to cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, itself already a Mercedes sponsor — another reminder that in 2026 the arms race isn’t only about wind tunnels, dynos and simulator correlation. It’s also about data security, computational muscle and the organisational speed to turn information into action.
None of this guarantees lap time, of course. Every team has some version of “AI-driven insights” in its vocabulary now, and the competitive edge is rarely the tool itself so much as how ruthlessly a team integrates it into decision-making — from design loops at the factory to the split-second calls on the pit wall. But Mercedes will be hoping the partnership does more than read well in a press release, particularly as it tries to hit the ground running under new regulations with a new car in the W17 and a fresh-looking line-up headed by George Russell and rookie Kimi Antonelli.
For now, Mercedes gets the global statement it wanted right before launch week: the most recognisable name in enterprise software buying into the idea that the next era of F1 will be decided as much by infrastructure and intelligence as by outright mechanical brilliance.
