Mistral AI says Europe needs its own superintelligence push before US tech giants turn access into leverage.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the French AI outfit is racing to build so-called superintelligence because Europe cannot afford to rely on US tech giants for the next stage of machine intelligence.
Paris-based Mistral has become Europe’s most visible AI developer by selling homegrown models and services hosted in European data centres. That pitch keeps it independent of American tech companies and Chinese competitors, which is handy when geopolitics starts chewing the furniture.
US tariffs and President Trump’s threats to take over Greenland have given Europe’s tech-independence push a fresh shove. Some European organisations have started replacing American software providers in government services, preparing for the once-unthinkable risk of the US cutting off access.
That political worry is now reaching into autonomous AI systems that might surpass human abilities, which the industry likes to call superintelligence, artificial general intelligence or AGI.
Mistral co-founder and chief scientist Guillaume Lample said: “Very soon in the future, we are probably going to see AGI or superintelligence, so it is very important that we have access to these models also in Europe.”
Lample warned that cancer cures and scientific breakthroughs could be withheld from Europe by commercial or geopolitical rivals if it lacks its own superintelligence capacity.
Lample said: “If we don’t have access to it, I think we can only imagine how bad it is going to be. It is absolutely critical that we get there.”
That is a bit of a shift for Mistral, which has usually sold itself as a scrappy enterprise AI player rather than a moonshot outfit chasing digital godhood. The company was founded by three French AI researchers from Google and Meta Platforms and was valued last year at about $14 billion.
It expects more than $1 billion in revenue this year, which is still tiddly compared with its Silicon Valley rivals.
Lample was speaking before a Mistral marketing event where the company announced new deals to supply AI services to European corporate beasts including Airbus and BMW.
Mistral said it is building a new 10-megawatt data centre south of Paris as part of $4.7 billion it is pouring into data centres in France and Sweden.
Mistral chief executive Arthur Mensch said the biggest obstacle to European tech independence is the sheer scale of investment needed. The company lines up debt to pay for data centres based on the revenue it expects from signed contracts.
“We can’t put $50 billion on the table to build a gigawatt ahead of demand. That’s potentially our biggest bottleneck,” Mensch said.
