The Mistral CEO said Europe needed to think of itself as a unified market.
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, said: “We think it is a bit of a trap to think about AI as something that is owned by states.
“This is not a state project. The only way to think about this technology is at a community level.
“In the US, it is a big market. Their strength is they can scale quickly. If you want to compete, and we need to compete because it is too important a technology to give up on, we need to think of Europe as a unified market.
“We need to come together and think of Europe as a single market, with enterprises buying European technology, with states buying 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 said Mistral was “really a global company”.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, Mensch said Paris-headquartered Mistral, which is seen as a competitor to the bigger US LLM firms, should top €1 billion in revenue this year.
Mensch today said Mistral had experienced 20 times growth over the past year, helped 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 making in Sweden.
On why Sweden, Mensch said: “Because it has access to clean energy, so low-carbon energy. We work with a lot of European enterprises and sustainability is a big concern for us.”
Also speaking at the event, Sweden’s deputy prime minister and business minister Ebba Busch said Europe’s edge in the global AI race against the US was its “political stability”, pointing out that stable markets helped bring in investment.
In an apparent criticism of Donald Trump, she said: “One of the main things we have is political stability. The Swedish position on AI is not going to change tomorrow in a new tweet. It is what it is.”
Busch said the key to European success in the global AI race would not be which country built the biggest 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 getting more usage from the apps built on top of Lovable, than Lovable itself.
He said: “This demonstrates that what is being created, there is value in it. I think that is hard to debate.”