Mistral AI the superstar of the AI Action Summit in Paris
A partnership here, a partnership there, plus a data centre and a cat: Mistral AI was the superstar of this week's Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris.
The French start-up, which is currently regarded as Europe's greatest hope for AI, has been dominating the headlines as it announced several new collaborations with well-known companies such as Iliad, Stellantis and Veolia Environnement. However, Mistral is not the only player in France to benefit from the AI Action Summit. The numerous investment projects announced at the summit will benefit the country's entire start-up scene.
In addition to an agreement with defence technology company, Mistral has also just joined forces with telecoms group Orange. The French telecoms giant announced a strategic partnership with the start-up on Tuesday, to drive the development of AI in Europe. The research and development departments of the two companies will work hand in hand to create the best network infrastructure for AI through open research, and jointly assess the impact of its massive use on telecoms networks, Orange said.
Mistral needs to generate revenue
The telecoms provider also wants to offer the two Mistral applications Le Chat Pro and LLM Codestral to business customers. Its competitor Free (Iliad Group) had already announced a partnership with Mistral prior to the AI summit, as had the automotive group Stellantis and environmental services provider Veolia Environnement. The American communications equipment supplier Cisco, in turn, has now expanded its existing partnership. Together with the French unicorn, it wants to develop an AI renewal agent for the customer experience.
„Our goal is to be a global market leader,“ said Mistral co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch to TV channel TF1. Mistral has already demonstrated this from a technological perspective. „Now we're trying to do it from the product side.“
Strategic partnerships are all the more important for the AI start-up as it now needs to generate revenue in order to defend its position. Mistral must achieve a turnover of 500 million euros by 2025, says BPI France CEO Nicolas Dufourcq. „Financing rounds are not an issue. They can raise 2 or 3 billion euros by snapping their fingers.“
Mistral was only founded almost two years ago, and now wants to step on the gas. It has just launched a mobile app for its AI chatbot Le Chat (the cat) for Android and iOS. It has also announced plans to build its first data centre in France together with a French holding company and open it in the coming months. According to Mensch, this will require investments totalling several billion euros.
More data centres
Many of the other investment projects totalling 109 billion euros that France was able to announce at the AI Summit also involve the construction of data centres. For example, the United Arab Emirates has signed an agreement with France for the largest AI campus in Europe. They want to invest 50 billion euros in a data centre, research and education programmes. And Canadian alternative investment manager Brookfield wants to invest 15 billion euros in a data centre.
Fluidstack from the UK, Evroc from Sweden, Sesterce from France as well as Equinix, Digital Realty and Prologis from the USA also want to invest several billion euros each in data centres in France. Telecoms provider Iliad wants to provide 3 billion euros for the expansion of AI infrastructures and research. Iliad founder Xavier Niel is one of the biggest supporters of AI in France.
Scaleway, Iliad's cloud subsidiary, also wants to mobilise funds to increase computing capacities for its customers. „The promised investments of 109 billion euros show the confidence that investors have in France,“ said President Emmanuel Macron during the summit, at the Station F start-up campus initiated by Niel.
