To the surprise of almost no one, France's great AI hopeful Mistral AI was the belle of the VivaTech 2025 ball, making a flurry of high-stakes announcements that it hopes will solidify its position as an ambitious global contender.
From launching a powerful reasoning model to forging a landmark partnership with NVIDIA to build sovereign AI infrastructure, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch found himself on stage on Day 1 where he was showered with praise by the likes of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and treated to hossanahs by President Emmanuel Macron who dubbed the partnership "historic."
For his part, Mensch seemed ready to accept the role as Europe's AI standard bearer.
“We are building not just models, but the infrastructure for sovereign, open, high-performance AI in Europe,” Mensch told the VivaTech audience. “This is about ensuring our values, our autonomy, and our capacity to innovate.”
Mistral and NVIDIA Join Forces
The most buzzed-about announcement came with the formalization of a groundbreaking partnership between Mistral AI and U.S. chip giant NVIDIA. Together, the two companies are launching a sovereign AI cloud infrastructure based in France dubbed "Mistral Compute." The goal is offer a European alternative to U.S. and Chinese AI dominance.
Huang said that Mistral Compute will be built with 18k Nvidia Grace Blackwell Superchips. With deployment projected for 2025, Mensch said the infrastructure will allow developers to build AI workloads without “relying on certain US providers.”
“We’re still doing models,” Mensch said. “On top of that, we’re going to be operating all of our software platform on digital assets that we’re deploying with NVIDIA. We’re expanding from an AI company doing software to a cloud company.”
The infrastructure, built in collaboration with Scaleway and other French tech players, will be open-access and API-driven. It’s expected to reduce Europe’s dependence on U.S. cloud giants while enabling local startups and research institutions to develop AI models without exporting their data or ceding control.
“The partnership between Mistral and NVIDIA is historic. It represents a new model for industrial collaboration between the public and private sector—and for asserting European leadership.”
Mistral Next: First European Reasoning Model
Beyond infrastructure, Mistral also unveiled Mistral Next, a frontier language model that introduces complex reasoning capabilities, making it the first European LLM to directly challenge OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude 3 in this domain.
Unlike standard large language models, Mistral Next has been trained to break down multi-step problems, such as legal reasoning, technical problem-solving, and scientific analysis. The model integrates what Mensch described as a “reasoning-first architecture,” explicitly designed for logic-intensive tasks.
“We’re no longer just talking about chatbots,” Mensch said. “This is a step toward machines that can support deep decision-making across sectors such as medicine, energy, law, and defense.”
The model has already garnered attention for outperforming GPT-4 on several reasoning benchmarks and for its notably lower compute costs, enabled by Mistral’s hyper-optimized inference stack.
With momentum building, Mistral is now planning a massive new funding round. Several recent reports suggested the company is preparing to raise $1 billion to further scale operations, infrastructure, and R&D.
Mensch signaled that the goal is not just to scale for growth, but to remain independent.
“Our vision requires capital, yes, but also conviction," he said. "We are not for sale. This is about building an enduring European champion.”
Strategic Alliances
Mistral also announced a major partnership with TotalEnergies, France’s oil and gas giant, to deploy large language models across its operations.
The deal includes use cases in energy forecasting, real-time emissions monitoring, and predictive maintenance. It is among the first industrial-scale AI applications of its kind in Europe. For TotalEnergies, the partnership represents both a leap in digital transformation and a strategic hedge amid mounting pressure to decarbonize. For Mistral, it opens the door to similar vertical integrations in energy, logistics, and manufacturing.
“TotalEnergies will benefit from a new class of models that are optimized for industrial data, not just consumer text,” Mensch said. “This is where AI meets energy transition.”
Groupe SNCF also announced a strategic partnership with Mistral AI to deepen the integration of generative AI across the transportation company's operations. A cornerstone of this initiative is the integration of Mistral AI's models into “Groupe SNCF GPT,” an internal multi-model generative AI tool already deployed to 100,000 employees. Additionally, SNCF developers will now have access to Codestral, Mistral AI’s coding assistant, to streamline software development tasks.
Beyond productivity enhancements, the partnership is intended to catalyze joint R&D efforts in AI tailored for rail industry needs. Potential use cases include predictive maintenance, improved passenger information systems, and transport planning optimization. Mistral AI will dedicate a team to work closely with SNCF, ensuring AI implementations are deeply aligned with operational realities.
Macron’s Bet on French AI
With former Meta and DeepMind researchers at the helm and an open-weight model strategy, Mistral has tried to differentiate itself from competitors such as OpenAI by combining technical excellence with a strong ideological stance on openness and sovereignty.
Yet its approach is increasingly pragmatic. Mensch now refers to Mistral’s models as “open where it makes sense, closed where it matters.” With commercial licensing, enterprise integration, and now vertical-specific models, Mistral is pivoting toward a hybrid strategy.
“We’re European. We’re sovereign. But we’re also here to win,” Mensch said. “That means being competitive not just in ideals, but in business...The race is not over. Europe is not late. We just needed the right tools—and now we have them.”
President Macron has been increasingly vocal about the need for technological sovereignty in the face of U.S. and Chinese dominance in AI. Mistral’s moves come as fears over U.S. AI dominance intensify in Europe. OpenAI and Google have secured major contracts with European corporations, while Chinese firms like Baidu and Alibaba are pushing hard into emerging markets.
Macron appears to be determined not to let the country be bypassed. The NVIDIA-Mistral partnership received immediate and direct support from Macron, who personally intervened to secure commitments from major French corporations. Huang recounted onstage how this high-level support materialized: "I was at the president's office, and I was describing this idea, and I told Mr. President that Arthur and Mistral need the support of the largest companies in France. And Mr. President says, 'Who are they? Let me call them.'"
The results were swift. "In just a few days, the great companies of France came out to support Arthur and Mistral," Huang noted, adding that this type of ecosystem support creates a "flywheel" effect that benefits the entire startup ecosystem.
Macron framed the partnership as crucial for European strategic autonomy. "This is our fight for sovereignty, for strategic autonomy," Macron declared. "We want our cloud, we want our data centers, we want our computing capacities, and we want all the services and infrastructures allowing us to preserve this intelligence."
Macron's actions and his appearance alongside Mensch and Huang at VivaTech emphasized the immense expectations the country is placing on the company.
“Mistral is not just a startup,” Macron declared. “It’s a symbol of what Europe can do when it invests in talent, science, and ambition.”
