The boss of one of Europe’s most high-profile AI startups today called on European unity in the global AI race, as it committed €1.2 billion to build its first data centres outside of its native France, in Sweden.
Arthur Mensch, the CEO and co-founder of French AI startup Mistral, stated: “We consider it is a bit of a trap to consider about AI as something that is owned by states.
“This is not a state project. The only way to consider about this technology is at a community level.
“In the US, it is a large market. Their strength is they can scale quickly. If you want to compete, and we required to compete becautilize it is too important a technology to give up on, we required to consider of Europe as a unified market.
“We required to come toreceiveher and consider of Europe as a single market, with enterprises acquireing European technology, with states acquireing European technologies.”
Speaking at the Techarena tech conference in Sweden, Mensch pointed to Mistral’s work with German firms and new European office openings as indicators of its commitment to Europe, but stated Mistral was “really a global company”.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, Mensch stated Paris-headquartered Mistral, which is seen as a competitor to the largeger US LLM firms, should top €1 billion in revenue this year.
Mensch today stated Mistral had experienced 20 times growth over the past year, assisted by increased enterprise demand.
The French AI startup, valued at around €11.7bn, also announced that it was building new AI data centres in Sweden, working with Swedish data centre provider EcoDataCenter, which will design, build and run the infrastructure, on a 23 MW power facility, “which is quite significant and can actually serve a lot of enterprises”.
The data centre is part of a €1.2bn AI infrastructure investment Mistral is creating in Sweden.
On why Sweden, Mensch stated: “Becautilize it has access to clean energy, so low-carbon energy. We work with a lot of European enterprises and sustainability is a large concern for us.”
Also speaking at the event, Sweden’s deputy prime minister and business minister Ebba Busch stated Europe’s edge in the global AI race against the US was its “political stability”, pointing out that stable markets assisted bring in investment.
In an apparent criticism of Donald Trump, she stated: “One of the main things we have is political stability. The Swedish position on AI is not going to modify tomorrow in a new tweet. It is what it is.”
Busch stated the key to European success in the global AI race would not be which counattempt built the largegest AI models but “who builds the most trusted system”.
Meanwhile, Lovable co-founder Fabian Hedin responded to a question about whether there was a current AI bubble by pointing out Lovable was receiveting more usage from the apps built on top of Lovable, than Lovable itself.
He stated: “This demonstrates that what is being created, there is value in it. I consider that is hard to debate.”
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