Microsoft and Mistral expand European AI infrastructure partnership

Microsoft and Mistral are expanding their AI partnership with a multi-billion-dollar plan to build infrastructure in Europe, according to The Decoder. Mistral is adding thousands of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs, and Microsoft will use that capacity for cloud and AI services.

The software side is expanding too. Mistral’s Medium 3.5 and OCR 4 models are now available in Microsoft Foundry, and Medium 3.5 is also available in Copilot Studio. Companies can run Mistral models through Azure Local in the cloud, in their own environments, or offline.

That deployment flexibility is aimed at regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing, where data control and local operation can matter as much as model capability. Microsoft President Brad Smith framed the deal around giving Europe access to powerful AI without giving up control over data.

Mistral, founded in 2023, has been growing quickly and positioning itself as a European alternative in a market dominated by U.S. and Chinese labs. The partnership gives it broader enterprise distribution while strengthening Microsoft’s regional AI infrastructure story.