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Odaily, July 21 - Microsoft and French AI startup Mistral AI announced an expansion of their strategic partnership on July 21, signing a multi-billion dollar agreement centered on European AI infrastructure to enhance AI computing capabilities in the region. Under the agreement, Microsoft will leverage Mistral's expanded European GPU infrastructure to support its cloud computing and AI services. This infrastructure will be based on thousands of Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs.In terms of products, the Mistral Medium 3.5 and OCR 4 models are now available on the Microsoft Foundry platform, and Mistral Medium 3.5 has also been integrated into Microsoft Copilot Studio for agent applications, document processing workflows, and industry-customized workflows. Additionally, the two parties will expand AI deployment options through Azure and Azure Local, supporting cloud, cloud-connected, and fully offline environments, targeting industries with high data compliance requirements such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing.
According to Odaily, as of June 23, 2026, Foundry Digital, AntPool, ViaBTC, and F2Pool collectively control over 70% of the Bitcoin network's hashrate, with shares of approximately 31%, 18%, 13%, and 10% respectively. Foundry Digital is a US-based mining pool backed by Digital Currency Group, primarily serving large institutions and publicly listed mining companies. In the first half of 2026, D-Central reported a Nakamoto coefficient of 3, meaning that just three mining pools would be enough to produce more than half of the blocks. ViaBTC faced stricter regulatory scrutiny in 2026, prompting some miners to shift to alternative pools like EMCD.
According to Fortune, Foundry, a leading Bitcoin mining pool, officially launched a new mining pool for the privacy coin Zcash on April 13. Mike Colyer, CEO of Foundry, stated that this move aims to address growing institutional demand for privacy coins. The pool has already attracted several institutional miners, and its output now accounts for nearly one-third of all newly minted Zcash globally. Zcash implements transaction privacy via zero-knowledge proof technology while supporting selective disclosure to meet regulatory compliance requirements—making it more appealing to institutions than its competitor Monero. Fueled by this news, Zcash’s price has surged over 75% in the past 30 days, with its current market capitalization standing at approximately $6.3 billion. Foundry currently controls about 31% of the global Bitcoin hash rate, making it the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pool operator.