The promise of sovereign AI is that a country can keep its models, data, and compute power at home. But there’s one critical component that has to come from outside: the chips.
“Today, there is no equivalent in Europe,” said Timothée Lacroix, cofounder and chief technology officer of French AI company Mistral AI, referring to the GPUs, CPUs, TPUs, and other types of advanced chips that are for the most part made by U.S. companies.
“I’m sure there are many alternatives that are going to be built, and we’ll help them out if that’s the case, but today it’s really about getting control where we can,” Lacroix said at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen on Monday.
Mistral has spent the past year extending beyond models and into infrastructure, with 50 megawatts of its own compute due this summer. The sovereign rationale is control at every layer of the technology
“To me, it’s really about giving our customers the choice on all layers of the stack for where they want to run what part of their workflow,” Lacroix said. That includes private, agent-driven work on a company’s own premises, and heavier inference hosted inside a customer’s own country “for strategic autonomy.”
