Nvidia teams up with Perplexity and Mistral AI: How will it impact Europe's AI infrastructure push?

Nvidia has proclaimed young collaborations with AI firms Perplexity and Mistral AI as component part of a wide initiative to beef up artificial intelligence infrastructure and language model development across Europe. The announcement was made during an AI conference in Paris, where the US-based chipmaker outlined its strategy to support regional AI growth with both hardware and software solutions.

In partnership with search firm Perplexity, Nvidia will work with over a dozen AI companies in Europe and the Middle East to refine their technologies and help distribute them to local businesses. This effort will involve the development of reasoning models—AI systems capable of handling more complex tasks—in various European languages, where training data is often limited.

Mistral AI, a French startup, is joining forces with Nvidia to launch a new service called Mistral Compute, which will run on 18,000 of Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell chips. The service will be based in the company’s data centre in Essonne, France, with plans to expand across the continent. The aim is to facilitate domestic AI computing capabilities and reduce dependence on overseas infrastructure.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said that Europe urgently needs to scale up its AI infrastructure if it wants to stay competitive globally. The firm is supporting this push by partnering with cloud and telecom providers and enabling small-scale access to its AI accelerators—specialised chips used to train and deploy AI models.

Kari Briski, Nvidia’s vice president for generative AI software, said the company is producing synthetic data in low-resource European languages to help train more robust local models. "We’re doing a lot of synthetic data generation and translating our reasoning datasets so they can be used in training," she said. Nvidia’s collaboration includes firms in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and Sweden.

Perplexity will support the deployment and accessibility of these models, ensuring they can be used by local enterprises for tasks such as content research and data analysis. The company’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, noted that Germany is already its second-largest market by revenue, underscoring the growing demand for regionally tailored AI services.

As part of the broader rollout, Nvidia also confirmed that its AI Lepton service, which connects developers to essential compute infrastructure, will now include participation from AWS and Mistral. The company added that “AI factories”—large-scale data centres for training and operating AI models—are being developed in over 20 European locations, several of which will be “gigafactories” housing more than 100,000 chips.

In the UK, companies such as Nebius Group and Nscale Global Holdings are also set to deploy thousands of Nvidia’s AI semiconductors, while other countries, including Italy and Armenia, are preparing to upgrade their hardware systems.

Despite Europe having over 1.5 million AI developers and nearly 10,000 businesses involved in Nvidia’s Inception startup programme, the continent still lags behind the US in terms of infrastructure investment. Nvidia said it plans to triple the region’s AI hardware capacity next year and increase total computing power tenfold.

(With inputs from Bloomberg and Reuters)

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