Rui Carmo
Mistral published a 52-minute read on how Europe should build an independent AI stack–talent pipelines, single-market scale, local infrastructure, sovereign compute, the lot. It reads like a policy brief dressed up as a manifesto, and while it has a glaring flaw and some of the proposals are predictably self-serving (Mistral is, after all, the company that would benefit most from “buy European AI” procurement rules), the underlying analysis is hard to argue with.
The five pillars–attract talent, scale the single market, drive adoption in the real economy, build local infrastructure, and secure sovereign AI capacity–are all sensible, and the specific measures (an EU AI talent visa, streamlined regulation, public procurement mandates, European cloud infrastructure) are concrete enough to be actionable rather than the usual Brussels hand-wringing. The 40% figure they cite for Europe’s share of global AI research output versus its minuscule share of commercialisation is the kind of stat that should make policymakers uncomfortable.
Where it completely falls apart, though, is that Mistral, even as an European company, currently doesn’t hire remotely in Europe – so the whole thing feels a tad insulting if, like me, you’re actually in the industry and not in politics.
There is some merit to it, though, and whether any of this actually happens is a different question entirely. Europe’s track record on turning common sense into working industrial policy is, to put it generously, mixed–and the current geopolitical climate makes “digital sovereignty” feel less like an aspiration and more like an urgent necessity that nobody has quite figured out how to fund.