NTT Data and Mistral AI will deliver private, compliant AI systems tailored for regulated sectors, giving enterprises local control over data, infrastructure and model deployment – independent from US-based hyperscalers.
Enterprise-grade – the partnership aims to deliver private, secure AI for finance, defense, and public sector clients.
Open models – brings open-weight foundation models adopted across open-source and EU policy circles.
Sovereign data – the deal supports Europe’s push for strategic autonomy in AI infrastructure and data sovereignty.
Global system integrator NTT Data has a deal with France’s Mistral AI, widely regarded as Europe’s strongest challenger to OpenAI, to jointly sell and deploy private enterprise AI solutions that “foster strategic autonomy for clients.” In other words, the partnership promises organisations – particularly in highly regulated sectors – greater control over their data, infrastructure, and AI capabilities, compared to closed or opaque platforms typically offered by US-based big tech, including both AI model and cloud providers.
Mistral AI, founded in 2023 by former Meta and DeepMind researchers, has raised over $1 billion across six venture rounds, including from Microsoft, and US venture groups Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and General Catalyst. Nvidia is a ‘strategic investor’, more around integration and resources. The company is valued at about $6 billion – after just two years. It is reportedly in talks to raise up to $1 billion in equity from investors, including Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund, says Bloomberg. It is widely described as Europe’s most serious OpenAI rival.
Its foundation models outgun many closed competitors of similar size (see here and here). Its ‘open weights’, the available AI model parameters for inspection and usage by developers, are well adopted in open-source communities, including via the Hugging Face platform. It is held up in EU policy circles as a flagship for Europe-made sovereign AI (see here and here), and advocated with the French government for concessions for open-source AI models in the EU AI Act. But Microsoft’s move a year ago to take a minor stake in the firm has also ruffled feathers.
But the deal with NTT Data is hugely interesting, especially given the trend in Europe to repatriate critical data for new AI operations, and the desperate search for a home-grown equivalent to the likes of OpenAI et al. As well, the global pursuit of localised foundation models in different languages and different industrial domains also informs the appeal of the new joint proposition. NTT Data and Mistral AI said they are targeting clients in regulated sectors like finance, defense, and public services, notably.
In sum, they are combining NTT Data’s services portfolio, delivery capabilities, and industry expertise with Mistral AI’s solutions, including its generative AI models. They will offer a managed AI solution – described variously as private, secure, enterprise-grade – which affords data residency and privacy so AI models run locally, or within trusted national/regional cloud infrastructure, in compliance with local laws. They will execute regional go-to-market strategies in line with the dynamics of “countries including France, Luxembourg, Spain, Singapore, and Australia”.
A statement said: “[We] will provide end-to-end solutions from infrastructure to business processes powered by AI applications for clients operating on private clouds… [We] will [integrate] Mistral AI technologies into NTT Data’s customer experience platforms, beginning with agentic AI call centre solutions in Europe and Asia Pacific. Joint projects could include co-development of LLMs for specific languages… Dedicated sales teams will be assigned to address key client needs and priorities.”
NTT Data will establish a Mistral AI Center of Excellence. Mistral AI will launch a training and certification programme for NTT Data staff. One of their first joint projects is to develop an AI application for patent searches and analyses for Luxembourg intellectual property management firm Dennemeyer. Another early effort is to co-develop a sovereign platform in Luxembourg for clients in the regulated financial services and insurance industries.
Abhijit Dubey, chief executive and chief AI officer at NTT Data, said: “Collaborating with Mistral AI to bring trustworthy, impactful AI to market aligns with NTT Data’s mission to accelerate client success and positively impact society through responsible innovation… We will harness the power of high-performing AI models combined with NTT Data’s comprehensive AI capabilities, including our Smart AI Agent Ecosystem. In doing so, we can assure secure, scalable and sustainable deployments for enterprises across the globe.”
Arthur Mensch, chief executive at Mistral AI, said: “BWe will bring our next-generation AI solutions into real-world business applications, with a strong focus on organizations that need the highest standards of data privacy in their AI journey.”