ASML is the flashy, public-facing partner. Mistral is also working with the French government and defense industry for applications that are unlikely to be publicly announced, but are bound to bring in much more money.
The European-sovereignty angle is what makes Mistral's strategy harder to read from the outside. If a meaningful share of revenue comes from EU government and defense contracts, the public benchmarks against OpenAI/Anthropic stop being the right scoreboard — they're optimizing for different procurement rules and a different definition of "trustworthy." Curious if anyone has visibility into how those contracts are structured: per-seat, on-prem, or something closer to hosted with sovereign keys?
I don’t know much about the really secret stuff, but Mistral is known to help customers build their own infrastructure to deploy their models and handle confidential data securely. They are also building data centers for their own cloud. It’s difficult to have a clear picture, in most cases we know about the partnership without having all the details (e.g. with ASML, CMA-CGM, or HSBC, or even worse with government or EU institutions).
I'd like to add that we have publicly the procurement from the US government for the US models. And I also guess the Chinese government uses their model providers as well. So I wouldnt see so strange anymore.