[Lalabadie]

SLAs that are valuable to their clients, guarantees and mechanisms to protect them from data exfiltration, and generally long-term contracts with cash-stable orgs like they're currently doing.

So long as they're sufficiently liquid at the right time, they don't really need to shelter more. They need to plan for a fire sale on the bulk of their operating expenses.

[SpicyLemonZest]

It's extremely hard to plan for a fire sale on the bulk of your operating expenses when all of your customers can see the fire sale happening and know they're now paying you way too much. That's the whole intuition of a general "US AI bubble"; if OpenAI filed for bankruptcy tomorrow, most people expect that would be a crisis for Anthropic and Gemini rather than a windfall opportunity to pick up their compute for cheap.

[Lalabadie]

The crash would come from being unable to fulfill financial engagements when total real income + funding fails to keep up with spending, and does it enough that the valuation mirage starts to fade.

What that reveals is the loaded cost of inference being more expensive than they've been showing, not cheaper. The crash would be the end of subsidized costs to users, not the revelation that it's a high-margin operation.

Selling compute/inference at more of a loss will probably not fly in the context of bankruptcy manoeuvers. They will need to shed spending engagements instead. I imagine Mistral would rather buy out some of their Nvidia purchase agreements for a discount if they want to build additional capacity at that time. I also don't think they'd be interested in US datacenters at all. If they want them they can get that in Canada, with a better ally and less political + financial risks, which is kind of the Mistral segment already.