Microsoft has announced a new partnership with French AI startup Mistral, which includes an investment of USD 16.3 million for a minority stake in the company. This partnership focuses on the use and development of AI language models.

As part of this collaboration, Mistral's AI language models, including the recently developed Mistral Large, will be available on Microsoft's Azure AI platform. Alongside its own infrastructure, Mistral is also utilizing Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning to present its models. 

The companies also plan to train purpose-specific models for select customers, including the European public sector.

Analyst QuickTake: This follows Microsoft’s investment of more than USD 10 billion in OpenAI a little over a year ago. Similar to the partnership with OpenAI, the companies will focus on the development and availability of large language models (LLMs). Mistral also announced the availability of its models on Amazon Bedrock just a couple of days ago. On a separate note, Mistral AI raised over USD 500 million in 2023, marking it as one of Europe's most well-funded AI startups.