Microsoft has recently expanded its partnerships with Databricks and Mistral, a French AI company. This collaboration covers various aspects such as Azure usage, custom processors, European computing capacity, and AI model distribution.
Databricks has announced that their partnership with Microsoft will extend into the 2030s. They plan to increase their utilization of Azure for internal business operations and analytics, as well as transition more workloads to Microsoft-designed processors. Azure Databricks will be used by Databricks to run core business operations, analytics, and to build a unified lakehouse.
The agreement also includes the use of Azure Cobalt, Microsoft’s Arm-based server processors, by Databricks. They intend to leverage these processors for data-intensive operations and agentic AI workloads. Databricks is currently using Cobalt 100 processors and plans to adopt Cobalt 200, which offers up to 50% better generational performance depending on the workload.
Microsoft has designed Cobalt 200 for scale-out workloads like data pipelines, cloud databases, and agentic AI applications. The processor incorporates Azure Boost to offload networking and remote-storage functions. Additionally, Databricks technology will be further integrated across Microsoft’s software portfolio, including Genie and Unity AI Gateway.
Mistral, on the other hand, has added more options for European infrastructure through a separate multibillion-dollar deal with Microsoft. This agreement allows Azure customers to develop software using Mistral’s data centers in France. The partnership provides European and regulated organizations with the opportunity to run AI workloads on infrastructure operated in France while still utilizing Microsoft software and security services.
Furthermore, Mistral aims to achieve one gigawatt of computing capacity by 2030, with a focus on Nvidia Vera Rubin graphics processing units for model training, inference, and large-scale deployments. The partnership also expands the distribution of Mistral’s models through Microsoft products, offering customers more options for developing and managing AI applications.
Overall, these expanded partnerships between Microsoft, Databricks, and Mistral demonstrate a commitment to enhancing infrastructure capabilities and AI model distribution for organizations in Europe and beyond.
