Snowflake, the data cloud company, and Mistral AI, a European-based AI startup, have announced a global partnership to provide Mistral AI’s most powerful language models directly to Snowflake customers in the Data Cloud.

The collaboration, backed by a parallel investment in Mistral’s Series A from Snowflake Ventures, focuses on providing enterprises with seamless access to large language models while prioritising security, privacy, and governance over their data.

As part of the partnership, Snowflake customers can now access Mistral AI’s latest LLM, Mistral Large, via the Snowflake Data Cloud. Additionally, Snowflake customers gain access to Mixtral 8x7B, an open-source model exceeding OpenAI’s GPT3.5 in speed and quality on most benchmarks, and Mistral 7B, a foundation model optimised for low latency, low memory requirements, and high throughput for its size.

“By partnering with Mistral AI, Snowflake is putting one of the most powerful LLMs on the market directly in the hands of our customers, empowering every user to build cutting-edge, AI-powered apps with simplicity and scale,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake. 

Snowflake Cortex LLM Functions, now in public preview, enables users to build generative AI apps quickly, easily, and securely. The Snowflake Cortex service, fully managed by Snowflake, supports industry-leading LLMs for specialised tasks like sentiment analysis, translation, and summarisation. 

Snowflake recently announced Sridhar Ramaswamy as the New Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors effective immediately. He will replace Frank Slootman, who decided to retire and step from the helm of the company.

Ramaswamy, who graduated from IIT Madras, joined Snowflake in May 2023 after selling his startup Neeva AI to the data cloud company. He held the position of Senior Vice President of AI at Snowflake.