Microsoft and Mistral Strike Multibillion-Dollar Deal for European AI Infrastructure

Microsoft and Mistral expanded their strategic partnership with a multibillion-dollar deal to co-build AI infrastructure in Europe. Mistral will add thousands of Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs, which Microsoft plans to use for cloud and AI products. Mistral's Medium 3.5 and OCR 4 models are already available on Microsoft Foundry, with Medium 3.5 also usable in Copilot Studio. Enterprises can run Mistral models via Azure Local in the cloud, on-premises, or fully offline—targeting regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. Microsoft President Brad Smith emphasized that Europe should have powerful AI without sacrificing data control. Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch sees the partnership as reaching global enterprises and public institutions, again warning against using closed-source models that might leak trade secrets. Since its founding in 2023, Mistral's revenue has grown 20x to over $400M annualized; it has invested €1.2B in a Swedish data center and is negotiating a ~€3B funding round at a ~€20B valuation. Its chatbot Le Chat has been renamed Vibe, adding Work Mode and Code Mode as an AI productivity tool.