On February 26th, Microsoft announced a long-term partnership with the French company Mistral AI, involving an investment of $2.1 billion.
Under the agreement, the European startup’s large language models (LLM) have been integrated into the tech giant’s Azure platform. Mistral becomes the second company after OpenAI to host its LLMs on the cloud computing platform.
Clients gained access to Mistral AI’s premium models through the Models as a Service (MaaS) offering in the Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning catalog. The AI-optimized infrastructure has opened up additional opportunities for the startup to promote, sell, and distribute its services to Microsoft’s global clientele.
Brad Smith, president of the American corporation, stated that the deal signals support for European technologies.
“We are entering into a long-term partnership with Mistral AI so they can train and deploy their next-generation AI models in our data centers,” he said during an interview with CNBC at the Mobile World Congress technology conference in Barcelona.
Representatives of the tech giant indicated that they will explore collaboration with Mistral AI in training models for select clients, including the European public sector.
Previously, Microsoft invested over $5 billion in AI and cloud infrastructure in Spain and Germany.