Mistral AI strikes multibillion-dollar deal with Microsoft to build out Azure infrastructure in Europe
French artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI SAS has struck a multibillion-dollar deal with Microsoft Corp. to expand its computing infrastructure in Europe and increase the availability of its top large language models in the U.S.
In an announcement today, Microsoft said that Azure cloud customers will soon be able to develop software using Mistral’s data centers located in France. The agreement gives Microsoft more capacity to cater to AI customers in Europe, while enabling regulated industries to access an alternative to U.S.-owned models and computing infrastructure.
The deal also sees two of Mistral’s top models listed in Microsoft Azure’s Foundry, which is a cloud-based service for developing AI applications. Mistral Medium 3.5 and OCR 4 have both been added to Foundry’s model catalog. The former is an open-weight model that can be customized and deployed within managed Azure environments, while the latter is designed for structured document processing workloads, automation and agentic workflows that require data to be extracted from business documents.
With Azure Foundry, businesses can discover, customize and deploy AI models and agents within the Azure cloud. The platform extended these capabilities to Azure Local environments that are located close to their customer’s data, employees and physical operations to address data residency requirements. With these models, companies will be able to develop AI applications once and then deploy them in different environments, based on regional data laws, and also their operational and connectivity requirements.
