Microsoft Announces Cloud Partnership With Mistral AI

Microsoft announced today a multi-year cloud partnership with Mistral AI, a France-based company working founded in April 2023 to work on generative AI technology. Through this new partnership, Mistral AI will be leveraging Microsoft’s Azure cloud to develop its next-gen large language model.

Mistral AI’s premium models will also become available for customers in the Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning model catalog, where they’ll provide an alternative to OpenAI’s models. Microsoft invested billions of dollars into OpenAI to make the technology behind ChatGPT available for developers. The company also used OpenAI’s technology to create its own family of “Copilot” AI assistants.

“Mistral Large is a general-purpose language model that can deliver on any text-based use case thanks to state-of-the-art reasoning and knowledge capabilities,” explained Eric Boyd, Corporate Vice President, Azure AI Platform at Microsoft. “It is proficient in code and mathematics, able to process dozens of documents in a single call, and handles French, German, Spanish, and Italian (in addition to English).”

Adding Mistral AI’s premium models to Azure’s AI-optimized infrastructure should help cement Microsoft’s position as one of the biggest supporters of AI innovation. The two companies are also committed to working together on AI research and development for select customers including European public sector workloads.

“With Azure’s cutting-edge AI infrastructure, we are reaching a new milestone in our expansion propelling our innovative research and practical applications to new customers everywhere. Together, we are committed to driving impactful progress in the AI industry and delivering unparalleled value to our customers and partners globally,” said Arthur Mensch, Chief Executive Officer of Mistral AI.