Mistral Confirms It Is Preparing a Bid to Lead an EU AI Gigafactory Consortium

Mistral AI is preparing to bid for one of the European Union’s planned AI gigafactories and wants to lead the winning consortium, the Brussels outlet Rapporteur reported on October 14. Charlotte Baylac de la Codre, the Paris company’s head of public affairs for compute, confirmed the plan at an event in Brussels on Tuesday. “We are preparing our application,” she said, adding that the goal was to lead a successful consortium by the end of next year.

The gigafactory scheme, announced last year by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, pools EU, national and private money to build very large AI data centres on European soil. Telecoms operators, banks, startups and even OpenAI signalled interest early; Mistral, Europe’s largest AI developer, had stayed quiet until now. France is also competing to host one of four smaller planned AI hubs, expected to come partially online by 2029, with each project costing about €3 billion and housing at least 75,000 AI chips.

Baylac de la Codre said Mistral would have preferred a faster mechanism “because we need this capacity today”, and criticised the “national logic” shaping how bids are assembled, calling it a way to slow Europeans down. She also rejected the idea that Europe can skip the race for the strongest models: helping Airbus build its next aircraft, she argued, requires a very capable reasoning model at the base of the AI stack.

What it means in practice

The bid would sit alongside France’s domestic compute build-out, from the Campus IA project near Paris to Bull’s rebuilt Angers factory for European supercomputers. It also follows the launch of Mistral Large 4, which the company says was trained on 3,800 specialised chips, around 4% of what its rivals use.

That efficiency claim underpins her view that Europe can do “better with less”. She said she was unconvinced by a recent estimate that the continent must invest around €800 billion to catch up with the frontier, arguing that the answer lies in using compute, energy and capital smartly rather than simply matching American spending.

What to watch: the formal call timetable, which French partners join a Mistral-led consortium, and whether Brussels softens the national logic the company has criticised.