The numbers are not that high as you would think.

Last year Github said they are giving away 11.5B action minutes [1] for public repos for free, that translates to about ~30,000 cores . The explosion in commits, pull requests and action minutes that Vlad the CTO mentioned[2] in the August postmortem is approximately 10x and he also highlighted they added 3 Million cores to their fleet.

Assuming a similar 10X growth in open source; total public repo compute budget is only 10% of the new compute they have added. Only half of Github is on Azure as of April, and Azure itself is much much larger.

Last year numbers were worth $180 Million going by list prices of action minutes [3]. However that would be only $20-30M equivalent typical outlay for a mid-size tech company if they were actually buying 30,000 cores on the cloud ; and definitely much cheaper for Azure's procurement ;

It is a good PR strategy and very good deal for Open Source but is really only a small customer acquisition line item for them and doesn't likely meaningfully impact their compute issues one way or other.

[1] https://github.com/resources/insights/2026-pricing-changes-f...

[2] https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/the-august-17...

[3] Action minutes are priced more expensive than even buying on-demand compute on the cloud including with Azure;