TotalEnergies and Mistral are spending more than €100 million over three years on a joint program to build AI models for TotalEnergies' geoscience teams, aimed at exploring, characterizing and developing oil and gas reservoirs.
The two companies will set up a joint scientific laboratory pairing TotalEnergies' subsurface know-how with Mistral's technology. The program draws on what TotalEnergies calls agentic AI, combining close to 10 petaflops of data with what the company describes as nearly a century of geoscience and reservoir engineering knowledge.
The aim is to build what the companies call frontier models able to integrate, process and interpret large volumes of subsurface data, generating multiple scenarios both for new exploration opportunities and for extending the life of projects already producing.
TotalEnergies says the deal lets it build proprietary AI models inside a European digital ecosystem, working with Mistral, which the company calls a European AI champion. TotalEnergies says it gains tools built for its own data, while Mistral gains a chance to grow further in that role.
Patrick Pouyanné, chairman and chief executive of TotalEnergies, said exploration and reservoir engineering are among the areas where artificial intelligence can create the most value for the company, and that pairing a century of geoscience data with Mistral's capabilities is meant to help its experts analyze complex data and make decisions. He also tied the deal to building a strong European digital ecosystem that supports the company's competitiveness.
Mistral co-founder and chief executive Arthur Mensch said the project shows the company's models can support complex industrial processes and called it a sign of the strength of Europe's industrial ecosystem. He said large companies need AI systems that can be customized while protecting their intellectual property.
