Mistral will invest €1.2 billion in Swedish data centers as CEO Arthur Mensch urges Europe to unite and compete globally in artificial intelligence.
Europe’s push to remain competitive in artificial intelligence took a concrete turn on Tuesday, as one of the continent’s most closely watched startups pledged €1.2 billion (about $1.3 billion) to build its first data centers outside France — in Sweden.
Arthur Mensch, Chief Executive and Co-founder of the Paris-based AI company Mistral, used the announcement to call for greater European unity in what he described as a global race too consequential to cede.
“We think it is a bit of a trap to think about AI as something that is owned by states,” Mensch said. “This is not a state project. The only way to think about this technology is at a community level.”
Speaking at the Techarena conference in Stockholm, Mensch argued that Europe must function as a unified market if it hopes to compete with the United States, where scale and speed have fueled the dominance of large language model developers.
“In the U.S., it is a big market. Their strength is they can scale quickly,” he said. “If you want to compete — and we need to compete because it is too important a technology to give up on — we need to think of Europe as a unified market.”
That unity, he added, should extend to procurement. “We need to come together and think of Europe as a single market, with enterprises buying European technology, with states buying European technologies.”
Founded in 2023, Mistral has quickly emerged as Europe’s most prominent challenger to larger American AI firms. At the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, Mensch said the company expected to surpass €1 billion in revenue in 2026. On Tuesday, he said Mistral had grown 20-fold over the past year, driven largely by enterprise demand.
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The company, valued at roughly €11.7 billion, said it would build the Swedish facilities in partnership with EcoDataCenter, which will design, construct and operate a 23-megawatt site. Mensch described the capacity as “quite significant” and capable of serving a broad base of enterprise customers.
The choice of Sweden, he said, was driven in part by access to low-carbon energy. “We work with a lot of European enterprises, and sustainability is a big concern for us,” Mensch said.
The announcement drew support from Sweden’s deputy prime minister and business minister, Ebba Busch, who framed Europe’s comparative advantage as political steadiness.
“One of the main things we have is political stability,” she said, in a pointed reference to the volatility of U.S. politics. “The Swedish position on AI is not going to change tomorrow in a new tweet. It is what it is.”
Busch argued that Europe’s success would not hinge on building the largest AI models but on creating the most trusted systems — an implicit appeal to the continent’s regulatory strengths.
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Questions about whether the industry is overheating also surfaced at the conference. Fabian Hedin, co-founder of Lovable, dismissed talk of an AI bubble, noting that applications built on Lovable’s platform were generating more usage than the platform itself.
“This demonstrates that what is being created — there is value in it,” he said. “I think that is hard to debate.”
For Mistral, the bet is clear: Europe’s future in AI will not be secured by rhetoric alone, but by infrastructure, capital and a willingness to act as one market rather than many.
