Mistral Rejects Acquisition To Stay Independent While Scaling European AI Infrastructure

ELelie@eliebakouch

Arthur Mensch answers to the french representatives: "our (mistral) models are capable of finding all the vulnerabilities found by mythos" "There are obviously people asking if they can buy us. We answer [no] because that's not our mission, and our mission is to be independent, [...] If you succeed, you don't get acquired. If you get acquired, in a way, you've failed" some numbers: > 1B R&D spend at Mistral this year > at Mistral 10% of salary mass is spent on tokens > estimates that 1 employee (in general, not at mistral) will consumes on average ~1kW in tokens per year, which is ~10k$ > 1GW datacenter is $50B capex over 5 years. you can expect to make 2x revenue. electricity captures ~10% of value. > revenue is 30% in France, rest of Europe is ~45%. public sector share is 20% with 10% in France. > a bit less than 30% of Mistral capital is held by US VCs > Mistral's goal is 1GW in 2029 > they train/will train bigger models internally and distill them to serve to customers > Mistral plays only a small part in the 35B investment (by MGX from UAE) in France, in the "campus AI" project announced at the AI summit earlier this year some of their current clusters: > 40MW in France > 25MW in Sweden > 80MW in France (next year) > they train models on "10s of MW", mention that they need the gpu to be collocated to train model > insists on the fact that EU/France advantage for building datacenters is nuclear power, which leads to less carbon footprint