French President Rallies Behind Mistral-Nvidia Cloud Partnership

France took a major step forward in asserting its artificial intelligence (AI) power Wednesday (June 11) as home-grown startup Mistral AI and U.S. chipmaker Nvidia announced a landmark partnership to develop next-generation AI cloud services in France.

During a high-profile panel at the Viva Tech 2025 conference, French President Emmanuel Macron, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch showcased a rare confluence of political power, industrial ambition and startup ingenuity.

“This is a game changer,” Macron said, praising the new collaboration as key to strengthening France’s technological independence. He added that the project would bolster French sovereignty with its own AI cloud, data centers and computing capacity.

The initiative, which centers around building AI data centers in France using Nvidia chips, would expand Mistral’s business model. The AI startup — widely considered Europe’s OpenAI – would transition from merely being a model developer to a vertically integrated AI cloud provider.

Mensch said he got this idea for a French AI data center after hearing from enterprise customers who were looking for a European provider alongside U.S. hyperscalers Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

“We’re still doing models,” Mensch said, “but on top of that, we are going to be operating more of our software platform on digital assets that we’re deploying — and that we’re deploying together.”

The partnership also reflects a broader vision shared by Huang, who used the occasion to reinforce his belief that national AI sovereignty is not just strategic — it’s existential.

“A country can outsource a lot of things,” Huang said. “But outsourcing all of your intelligence makes no sense.”

“The intelligence of your country encodes, embeds its people’s knowledge, history, culture, common sense, values,” Huang added. “That intelligence cannot be outsourced.”

“The data of your country belongs to your country … like the land belongs to your country,” Huang continued, adding that “you should find a way to learn how to harvest that data and transport that data into AI.”

The Mistral partnership is Nvidia’s bet on building regional AI ecosystems beyond Silicon Valley. “Great technology companies are built with great leadership, great founders, great scientists,” Huang said, calling Mensch “brilliant … the best hope” for Europe.

See also: Mistral Debuts Corporate Chatbot Amid Threefold Rise in Revenue

The AI data centers project didn’t come together by accident — it took a nudge from the French president. Huang revealed that he asked for  Macron’s help to connect Mistral with France’s largest companies.

“I was at the president’s office,” Huang recounted. “I told Mr. President that Arthur Mensch needs the support of the largest companies in France. And Mr. President says, ‘Who are they? Let me call them.’ And he called them.”

Within days, Macron had rallied France’s top corporate leaders to back the initiative.

Macron positioned this as part of a broader strategic shift. “We want to cooperate with the Chinese, American, Korean solutions,” he said, “but we want to be sure that we will choose this cooperation — we will not be dependent on them.”

Mistral’s evolution — from a lean team of AI scientists to an enterprise software and infrastructure provider — illustrates a new French AI playbook that emphasizes self-reliance, agility and cultural sovereignty.

“The approach in Europe has to be much more hands-on,” Mensch said. “It’s long, it’s complicated to get into an enterprise to bring value with AI. But once you learn that, then you’re in a very good position.”

Mensch emphasized the need to embed local expertise into AI systems. “The only way you’re going to be able to do that is to use all of the data that is getting produced by your operations,” he said. “You want to build your own intelligence not only at the country level, not only at the European level, but also at the enterprise level.”

The Mistral-Nvidia deal marks a major milestone, but Macron made it clear it’s just the beginning.

“We want now to go upstream,” Macron said. That means manufacturing chips in France, not just deploying them — an ambition he tied to earlier French industrial efforts with SGS-Thomson and STM in the 1990s.

For Huang, who’s spent over 30 years steering Nvidia from graphics chips to global AI leadership, the stakes are clear. “You don’t need the world’s absolutely best AI that is generic,” he said. “You need the best AI for you.”

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