French oil and gas major TotalEnergies has partnered with French AI firm Mistral to develop a new generation of frontier AI models to support TotalEnergies’ geosciences experts in exploring, characterizing, and developing oil and gas reservoirs.

The partnership will be for an initial three years and represent an investment of more than €100 million ($115.3m). According to the partners, the collaboration will seek to develop new frontier models that can integrate, process, and interpret large volumes of data to generate multiple scenarios for developing exploration opportunities, in addition to optimizing and extending existing projects.

As part of the tie-up, the companies will also establish a joint scientific laboratory that combines TotalEnergies’ subsurface expertise with Mistral’s scientific and technological capabilities.

“Exploration and reservoir engineering are among the areas where artificial intelligence can create the greatest value for our activities. By combining a century of geoscience data, the expertise of our teams and Mistral’s capabilities, we aim to develop a new generation of tools capable of supporting our experts in analyzing the most complex data and in their decision-making. This partnership also illustrates our commitment to contributing to the development of a high-performing European digital ecosystem, supporting our competitiveness,” said Patrick Pouyanné, chairman and CEO of TotalEnergies.

“We are delighted to take our collaboration with TotalEnergies to the next level. This project demonstrates the ability of our models to support complex industrial processes and adapt to the most demanding scientific and energy challenges. It also highlights the strength of Europe’s industrial ecosystem and the importance for large enterprises of adopting state-of-the-art, customizable AI solutions that protect and respect their intellectual property,” said Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral.

Mistral AI was established and launched in April 2023. In September, the firm raised €3 billion ($3.48bn) in a Series D funding round, giving it a post-money valuation of €21bn ($24.4bn).

The company in July signed a multi-billion-dollar deal with Microsoft for compute across Europe, featuring Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs.

It also leases space at a data center in Bruyères-le-Châtel, south of Paris, which is owned and run by French data center firm Eclairion. In March, the company raised $830m in debt financing to fund the purchase of 13,800 Nvidia GB300 GPUs for the facility.

In May, it announced plans to deploy at Digital Realty’s Paris South facility. Mistral is additionally planning a €1.2bn ($1.42bn) data center at EcoDataCenter’s Borlänge site.