Mistral Is Thinking Of Making Its Own AI Chips

Can Europe build a credible artificial intelligence challenger while relying on American chips, American cloud providers and American capital to power its ambitions? French startup Mistral AI is increasingly signaling that the answer may be no, as the company explores designing its own semiconductors and pours billions of euros into data centers in a broader European effort to reduce dependence on U.S. technology giants such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in the race to dominate the next generation of AI infrastructure.

French AI startup Mistral AI is exploring the possibility of designing its own chips in the future as it ramps up investment in data centers and AI infrastructure to compete with U.S. rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

“Of course, it is interesting,” Chief Executive Arthur Mensch told CNBC when asked about the prospect of Mistral developing its own semiconductors, adding that the company was not ruling out the idea.

Mensch said custom chips could help “lower the cost of deploying tokens to meaningful extents.” Tokens are units of data processed by AI systems.

“Owning the chips may come, I think it should come at some point, but for now we are relying on Nvidia, which is a great partner to us, and we’re testing a few things here and there,” he said.

The comments mark Mistral’s first public remarks about potential semiconductor ambitions and highlight a broader push by AI firms to gain greater control over computing infrastructure.

The Paris-based company, valued at nearly 12 billion euros ($13.6 billion), develops large language models and is expanding its data center footprint using chips from Nvidia. It is widely viewed as Europe’s leading challenger to dominant U.S. AI firms.

Large technology companies including Amazon and Google have increasingly developed their own application-specific chips for AI workloads, seeking tighter integration between hardware and software while reducing dependence on outside suppliers.

Mistral on Thursday also announced a new data center in France dedicated to inferencing, the process of running AI models after training.

The company has invested 4 billion euros in data centers in France and Sweden to expand computing capacity.

“Europe is lagging behind when it comes to buildout of infrastructure, and so we are investing to close that gap,” Mensch said.

He said Europe was beginning to see artificial intelligence as a strategic asset in the same way it views energy security.

“You can’t afford to have a commercial deficit of a trillion if you actually want to stay competitive in the race,” Mensch said.

The additional computing capacity in France will serve both Mistral’s customers and other AI laboratories, he added, without naming specific firms.

“AI labs are in sore need of compute, and we have some of it, and some of them are actually asking us for a lot of compute today,” Mensch said.

Mistral also unveiled a new enterprise AI agent platform called “Vibe,” designed to automate tasks such as drafting documents and writing code, as competition intensifies in the fast-growing market for so-called agentic AI systems.

“Users can set the brief and move on, as Vibe thinks, drafts, and delivers finished work from a single conversation,” Chief Technology Officer Timothée Lacroix said in a statement.

The latest product launches come as Mistral pushes to accelerate revenue growth. The company is targeting 1 billion euros in revenue in 2026, up from 200 million euros the previous year, though still well below larger U.S. competitors.

OpenAI generated $20 billion in annualized recurring revenue in 2025, while Anthropic is projected to reach $10.9 billion in revenue in the second quarter of 2026.

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