NTT Data has tapped Mistral AI to be its partner in offering generative AI solutions to global enterprises, giving the artificial intelligence (AI) startup immediate access to 75% of the Fortune global 100 that are clients of the Japanese giant.
The two companies, which announced their partnership on Tuesday (July 29), will combine NTT Data’s suite of global IT services with Mistral AI’s open-weight generative models.
Mistral AI, which is widely considered Europe’s answer to OpenAI, is a developer of frontier AI models but has lacked the global enterprise infrastructure and customer support systems at a scale of big companies like NTT Data.
With the partnership, Mistral’s models will be widely distributed. Meanwhile, NTT Data gets a top-tier AI startup partner to develop generative, reasoning and agentic AI models to offer its clients.
NTT Data will also develop a Mistral AI Center of Excellence and launch a technical enablement and certification program for its staff.
The companies aim to deliver sustainable and secure AI platforms initially tailored to highly regulated sectors such as financial services, insurance, defense and governments.
Mistral’s partnership can be compared to OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft. Microsoft, as a majority investor in OpenAI, gets access to its frontier AI models like the GPT series and offers them to enterprise clients through its Azure cloud service. OpenAI gets wide distribution among cloud clients.
AWS and Anthropic also have a similar relationship. AWS offers Anthropic’s Claude models through its cloud service. It has invested $8 billion into the AI startup. Google also has invested in Anthropic. AWS and Google Cloud give their clients access to Anthropic’s Claude AI models.
See also: Report: Mistral Aims to Raise Financing for AI Cloud Service
Partnership to Focus on Three Areas
The NTT partnership comes as Mistral received assistance from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to help it keep up with U.S. rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which have raised billions of dollars in investor capital. Huang had lobbied French President Emmanuel Macron to connect Mistral to established French companies and cultivate potential clients.
NTT and Mistral said they will initially focus on three areas:
- Developing secure AI applications on private cloud infrastructure
- Integrating Mistral’s technologies into NTT Data’s customer experience platforms, including agentic AI-powered call centers in Europe and Asia Pacific
- Creating regional go-to-market strategies tailored to specific dynamics in countries including France, Luxembourg, Spain, Singapore and Australia. Dedicated sales teams will support joint offerings, from use-case development to managed services.
Early projects include a collaboration with Dennemeyer, a global provider of intellectual property management, to create an AI application for advanced patent search and analysis.
Another initiative involves the creation in Luxembourg of a sovereign AI platform — all data and AI workloads must stay in the country — for clients in financial services and insurance. NTT Data called the project a “landmark” opportunity.
“By joining forces with Mistral AI, we will harness the power of high-performing AI models combined with NTT Data’s comprehensive AI capabilities, including our ‘Smart AI Agent Ecosystem,’” said Abhijit Dubey, CEO and incoming chief AI officer of NTT Data, in a statement.
Mistral AI’s CEO Arthur Mensch added: “By collaborating with a global leader in digital transformation like NTT Data, we will bring our next-generation AI solutions into real-world business applications.”
Source: https://www.pymnts.com/news/artificial-intelligence
