TotalEnergies partners with Mistral AI in deal worth over €100 million to enhance oil exploration

TotalEnergies is pouring more than €100 million into a three-year partnership with French AI startup Mistral AI, aiming to build bespoke artificial intelligence models that can improve how the company finds and extracts oil and gas. The deal, announced on September 15, pairs one of Europe’s largest energy majors with one of the continent’s most prominent AI companies. The core pitch: take nearly a century’s worth of TotalEnergies’ geoscience knowledge, combine it with Mistral’s agentic AI technology, and build tools that can generate exploration scenarios faster and more accurately than human teams working alone. What the partnership actually involves The two companies plan to establish a joint scientific laboratory where their respective teams will work side by side. TotalEnergies brings the domain expertise and, critically, an enormous dataset: nearly 10 petaflops of subsurface data accumulated over decades of global exploration. Mistral brings the AI architecture to make sense of it all. The investment, which exceeds €100 million (roughly $115 million), will fund the development of proprietary AI models tailored specifically to upstream geoscience. The models are designed to opt...