G42 & Mistral AI announce strategic partnership
UAE-French partnership spans full AI value chain
#UAE #R&D - Abu Dhabi-based global technology group G42 and Paris-headquartered AI company Mistral AI have announced a strategic partnership to co-develop next-generation AI platforms and infrastructure. Announced during the Choose France Summit, the collaboration will bring together G42’s operational scale and AI capabilities, together with Mistral AI’s frontier research, solutions and products in open-weight large language models.
SO WHAT? - The collaboration aligns with broader AI cooperation agreements made in February 2025, supported by UAE President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and French President Emmanuel Macron. This year Abu Dhabi’s AI ecosystem has begun to form an increasing number of powerful international alliances to develop new technologies, new AI ecosystems and new AI infrastructure projects. The outputs from partnerships with pioneering AI firms such as Mistral AI may well have a significant impact on the global AI landscape.
Here are some more details about this announcement:
Abu Dhabi-based G42 and pioneering AI company Mistral AI have formed a strategic partnership to co-develop next-generation AI platforms and infrastructure. The announcement was made at the Choose France Summit.
The strategic alliance will integrate Mistral AI's expertise in open-weight large language models with G42's operational scale and AI capabilities through its operating companies, including Core42 (AI Infrastructure) and Inception (AI Platform and Solutions development).
The partnership spans the entire AI value chain from model training and AI agents to infrastructure development and industry-specific applications across Europe, the Middle East, and the Global South.
Technical autonomy and IP governance mechanisms have been designed to protect innovation while enabling scalable deployment, balancing the need for sovereignty with interoperability.
Both companies will explore opportunities to promote each other's offerings in their respective existing markets and jointly enter new international territories, particularly focusing on regions historically underserved by technology infrastructure.
As part of the agreement, Mistral AI will explore collaboration opportunities with the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), the world's first AI-dedicated university based in Abu Dhabi.
The MBZUAI collaboration will focus on advanced research and development in frontier foundation models, talent development, and translating cutting-edge research into real-world AI solutions.
The partnership builds upon the longstanding economic and cultural ties between the UAE and France.
ZOOM OUT - In February 2025, Mistral AI releases the first version of its Mistral Saba large language model, the company's first regional language model. The 24-billion parameter model was specifically designed to enhance AI fluency in Arabic and South Asian languages, with benchmarking showing it outperforms models five times its size. The move set Mistral AI apart from its biggest competitors, who have so far chosen to standardise on international models trained in many languages, rather than create region-specific models. Therefore, the shared interest in developing region-specific language models may create a potential area of collaboration between G42 Group and Mistral AI.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]