Nvidia Joins Forces with Mistral for Strategic AI Expansion in Europe
The partnership is aimed at boosting the market for AI.
Nvidia and Mistral are partnering to improve AI in Europe. The announcement was made by Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang during a joint Nvidia-VivaTech event in Paris, part of a globe-trotting campaign to promote the adoption of AI and his company’s products. A data center buildout is needed in Europe to help countries there catch up in deploying the technology, Huang said.
Expanding AI Systems
The chipmaker is trying to expand the market for AI accelerators — the processors used to develop and run artificial intelligence models. Nvidia is particularly pushing for countries to deploy technology on a national level and trying to make it easier for individual companies to get the benefits from AI.
In France, Nvidia will team up with Mistral to use local AI computing to run the startup’s services. An offering called Mistral Compute will tap 18,000 new Grace Blackwell chips from Nvidia. It will be developed in Mistral’s data center in Essonne, France, and the company plans to roll it out to other locations in Europe.
In the UK, AI firms Nebius Group and Nscale Global Holdings Ltd. will use “thousands” of such semiconductors for their own platforms. Other countries, including Italy and Armenia, also are installing new hardware, Nvidia said.
In Europe, Nvidia is working with 1.5 million developers and 9,600 businesses, as well as 7,000 startups in what the company calls its inception program.
“The only thing that’s missing is infrastructure,” Dion Harris, Nvidia’s director of data center and high-performance computing, said in a briefing ahead of the presentations. Nvidia is working with cloud and telecommunications companies across Europe, he said.
Bringing Europe Up to Speed
Europe has lagged behind the US in developing the infrastructure for AI and hasn’t matched the spending promised in other regions. Huang said at an event in London on Monday with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer that a lack of infrastructure was holding back growth in a country that otherwise had the expertise and startups to be a global competitor in AI.
Huang said at the GTC-VivaTech event that more than 20 so-called AI factories are being planned and built across Europe in the next two years, with “several” of them being “gigafactories.” The larger facilities will be home to over 100,000 chips. It calculates that AI hardware capacity in Europe will grow by three times next year.
