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Mistral AI, the French artificial intelligence startup, announced Wednesday a sweeping expansion into AI infrastructure that positions the company as Europe’s answer to American cloud computing giants, while simultaneously unveiling new reasoning models that rival OpenAI’s most advanced systems.
The Paris-based company revealed Mistral Compute, a comprehensive AI infrastructure platform built in partnership with Nvidia, designed to give European enterprises and governments an alternative to relying on U.S.-based cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The move represents a significant strategic shift for Mistral from purely developing AI models to controlling the entire technology stack.
“This move into AI infrastructure marks a transformative step for Mistral AI, as it allows us to address a critical vertical of the AI value chain,” said Arthur Mensch, CEO and co-founder of Mistral AI. “With this shift comes the responsibility to ensure that our solutions not only drive innovation and AI adoption, but also uphold Europe’s technological autonomy and contribute to its sustainability leadership.”
How Mistral built reasoning models that think in any language
Alongside the infrastructure announcement, Mistral unveiled its Magistral series of reasoning models — AI systems capable of step-by-step logical thinking similar to OpenAI’s o1 model and China’s DeepSeek R1. But Guillaume Lample, Mistral’s chief scientist, says the company’s approach differs from competitors in crucial ways.
“We did everything from scratch, basically because we wanted to learn the expertise we have, like, flexibility in what we do,” Lample told me in an exclusive interview. “We actually managed to be, like, a really, very efficient on the stronger online reinforcement learning pipeline.”
Unlike competitors that often hide their reasoning processes, Mistral’s models display their full chain of thought to users — and crucially, in the user’s native language rather than defaulting to English. “Here we have like the full chain of thought which is given to the user, but in their own language, so they can actually read through it, see if it makes sense,” Lample explained.
The company released two versions: Magistral Small, a 24-billion parameter open-source model, and Magistral Medium, a more powerful proprietary system available through Mistral’s API.
Why Mistral’s AI models gained unexpected superpowers during training
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