Microsoft on Tuesday sought to reassure European users with a “multi-billion dollar” deal to lease AI infrastructure from Mistral, vaulting the French developer into the lucrative business of leasing computing capacity.
Mistral’s own AI models will also be offered directly to Microsoft customers through its tools including AI assistant Copilot.
The deal “strengthens Europe’s AI infrastructure while helping Microsoft meet growing demand for cloud and AI services” on the continent, the two companies said in a joint statement.
Neither company specified the exact dollar value of the deal or the amount of computing power Mistral would provide.
But the French firm has targeted 200 megawatts of capacity by 2027 and aims to reach one gigawatt by 2030 – roughly equivalent to the output of one of France’s dozens of nuclear reactors.
Mistral told AFP that the tie-up “gives us greater visibility to accelerate the financing and development of Mistral Compute”, its cloud infrastructure and AI business.
Founded three years ago and with 1,000 staff, Mistral is spending four billion euros ($4.6 billion) on data centers in France and Europe, with one already operational outside Paris and another under construction in Sweden.
Its ambitions remain relatively small compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars and gigawatts of computing that US firms are building.
But he joins the many generative AI developers now selling computing power to others as the industry expands and high-end chips become scarce.
For example, Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI struck a deal with Anthropic in May.
The AI lab behind chatbot Claude is also in talks for a multibillion-dollar deal to use infrastructure belonging to Facebook and Instagram parent Meta, according to media reports.
Microsoft insisted that using infrastructure physically located in Europe could address growing customer concerns about dependence on US technology firms at a time of transatlantic disputes.
“Europe must have access to the world’s most capable artificial intelligence without compromising control over their data, operations or digital future,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a statement.
The company has sought to position itself as the cloud computing provider most compliant with European technology sovereignty concerns.
Customers can run the Mistral models available through Copilot on Microsoft’s cloud computing infrastructure or their own local hardware, the US company said.
