Microsoft has entered a multi-year partnership with French start-up Mistral AI to develop practical applications in this emerging field.
For Mistral AI, this partnership opens up access to Microsoft Azure’s AI infrastructure, enabling it to accelerate the development and deployment of large language models (LLMs). It also enables Mistral AI to unlock new commercial opportunities, expand to global markets and foster ongoing research collaboration.
In particular, the partnership will focus on three key areas:
- Supercomputing infrastructure: Microsoft will support Mistral AI with Azure AI supercomputing infrastructure to deliver on performance and scale for AI training and inference workloads for Mistral AI’s flagship models.
- Scale to market: Making Mistral AI’s premium models available to customers through the Models as a Service (MaaS) in the Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning model catalog.
- AI research and development: Both companies will look to work on training specific models for select customers, including European public sector workloads.
As part of the deal, Microsoft has also invested €15 million in the French AI start-up, according to data from Crunchbase.
Partnership raises concerns
However, the announcement has raised eyebrows within the EU, with the European Commission launching an investigation into the deal.
“The Commission is looking into agreements that have been concluded between large digital market players and generative AI developers and providers,” European Commission spokesperson Lea Zuber told POLITICO. “In this context, we have received the mentioned agreement, which we will analyze.”
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Shruti Khairnar is a seasoned B2B reporter with a diverse background in financial journalism. She has written for prominent B2B publications including FinTech Futures, ESG Investor, Sustainabonds and more.
