Azure OpenAI deployment blocked by subscription policy despite supported regions (RequestDisallowedByAzure)

Tabrez Mukadam 20 Reputation points
2025-12-14T14:51:23.6766667+00:00

I am unable to deploy any Azure OpenAI model due to a subscription-level policy restriction.

Environment:

  • Subscription: Azure for Students
  • Azure OpenAI resource successfully created
  • Available regions shown in portal: East US 2, Sweden Central and my listofallowedregions are: ["centralindia","eastasia","austriaeast","southeastasia","koreacentral"]
  • Models visible in Azure OpenAI Studio (e.g. gpt-35-turbo, gpt-35-turbo-16k)

Issue:

When attempting to create a model deployment (Standard deployment, auto-update to default version), the deployment fails with:

InvalidTemplateDeployment

RequestDisallowedByAzure

“This policy maintains a set of best available regions where your subscription can deploy resources.”

In some cases, the deployment UI appears to succeed, but API calls return:

404 DeploymentNotFound

Important notes:

  • This is NOT a model deprecation issue (no existing deployments)
  • This is NOT a quota issue
  • The error occurs even in regions that are listed as supported and selectable
  • Azure CLI deployment commands also fail due to the same policy restriction

Question:

Is Azure OpenAI model deployment restricted by policy for Azure for Students subscriptions, even when the region and model appear available in the portal?

If so:

  • Is there any supported way to enable deployments for evaluation or testing?
  • Is this expected behavior or a known limitation?

Any clarification from users who have successfully deployed Azure OpenAI on Azure for Students would be helpful.

Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models
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Answer accepted by question author
TP 165.2K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
2025-12-15T05:41:34.7933333+00:00

Hi,

Unfortunately under Azure for Students subscription you are only allowed to deploy resources in one of the five regions in the Allowed resource deployment regions policy assignment. Whether or not a region shows up in the portal dropdown does not change this.

You may consider creating a new Pay-As-You-Go Azure account using different email/cc and use that for your Azure OpenAI. You could convert your existing account but I believe you will lose your credits so not the best option.

Please click Accept Answer and upvote if the above was helpful.

Thanks.

-TP

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