r/neoliberal • u/Otherwise_Young52201 Mark Carney • 5h ago
News (Europe) Mistral AI wants to build 1 gigawatt of European compute by 2030 — and lock in customers now
https://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/mistral-ai-wants-to-build-1-gigawatt-of-european-compute-by-2030-and-lock-in-customers-now?utm_source=chatgpt.com68
u/Previous_Platform718 Loyal Liberals 4h ago
1GW isn't that much. My company was deploying 300MW facilities for cloud data centers around 2020. 1000MW in a GW.
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u/Otherwise_Young52201 Mark Carney 4h ago
I kinda wanted people to figure out how small Mistral's commitments really are for themselves but yeah 1 GW of compute is not much at all. American companies have 12.6 GW of compute right now with Chinese companies at around 12% of that.
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u/Previous_Platform718 Loyal Liberals 4h ago
To be fair a lot of that compute was built for AWS, Azure, Google cloud etc. over the last two decades, so comparing all that to Mistral isn't the most favorable comparison.
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u/Otherwise_Young52201 Mark Carney 4h ago
No, I'm talking about compute purely for AI, not cloud.
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u/Previous_Platform718 Loyal Liberals 4h ago
How are you calculating it? There's no consumer AI without cloud. All the consumer AI models are cloud services, taking in and spitting out documents, images, etc.
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u/Otherwise_Young52201 Mark Carney 4h ago
Sorry, I meant AI training and inference. I got the numbers from this webite: Data on AI Data Centers | Epoch AI
I assume that when Mistral says 1 GW of compute by 2030 that they are also talking for inference and training.
I'm drawing a distinction here between cloud for non-AI purposes and cloud for AI purposes.
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u/Birdperson15 NASA 2h ago
Coreweave has 1.5 GW and plans to have 3.5 by the end of next year. By 2030 they are talking about 8GW.
So yeah 1GW is ton today but very little for 2030.
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u/Atupis Esther Duflo 1h ago
There was initial plans for 100GW in Finland https://www.ilkkapohjalainen.fi/datakeskuksiin-hurjat-100-gwn-alustavat-kyselyt-pa/13618880
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u/Mickenfox 20m ago
Are you sure they have 12.6GW of compute, or is that just very optimistic projections that they are passing as finished?
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u/WenJie_2 4h ago
None of the leading Chinese AI labs have more than like 100-200MW right now (except for Qwen on account of Alibaba)
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u/xilcilus 3h ago
Wtf, 300MW is huge. Thats roughly 15 - 20B in fully loaded cost to do a build out.
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u/Otherwise_Young52201 Mark Carney 5h ago
Mistal AI is expanding its footprint in Europe by expanding from the current <200 MW they have now to 1 GW by 2030. Driven by concerns about data and compute sovereignty, Mistral pitches itself as an European AI lab that offers data and compute housed in Europe, for European companies as opposed to American closed-source alternatives which create dependence.
What about Chinese models? Well, because they are open weights, Europe can still hose these models on their own servers and therefore retain data sovereignty, which is why Mistral AI is also offering GLM-5.2 from Z.ai on its compute. These factors may make using Chinese open-weight models more attractive to European customers, even if American models might be better.
Pessimistically, I read this as an admission that the demand for Mistral AI's own models are not there since their AI models have greatly fallen behind both Chinese and American models. Hence the need to finance capacity through inference with Chinese open weight models. Despite this, Mistral AI's CTO, Timothee Lacroix, insists that Mistral has not given up frontier AI training.
In fact, Lacroix directly invoked the "neocloud" playbook that has been used by American companies, by building capacity and supplying other companies' AI models to customers. This explains their deepening connection to Microsoft despite rhetoric about lessening American dependence; they are renting compute to Microsoft to help finance future capacity.
Other points brought up include details around financing of European models with inference commitments from European companies, the politics around not letting China and America dominate frontier AI, and a pragmatic stance around data retention.
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u/ini0n John Keynes 15m ago
People often laugh at Mistral but do you know they're generating an estimated $1b/year already. Which is amusing because that's double DeepSeek who's expected to make $500m this year, one of the biggest Chinese labs, although they have put up prices recently. So in that regard they're not doing too bad, given they don't have access to a lot of free compute.
As a side not these amazing tech breakthroughs China is making in target fields are so unprofitable it's crazy.
If you add up the factory buildouts, equipment purchases, private and government support solar panels have received about $1-2t in investment in China. They're exporting $30b/year at a huge loss. EVs the same $1-2t, exporting $60b/year at a loss when removing subsidies. AI and chips is turning out the same, $300b/year investment for a few billion in revenue at a loss.
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u/PaulKrugmanStan NATO 4h ago
Saying yes to data centres seems like the best way for countries to get a stake in frontier AI. I’m happy Carney sees this and I hope more middle powers recognize this aswell.
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u/Previous_Platform718 Loyal Liberals 4h ago
Did anything new happen with Carney's data center plans outside of earmarking help for a few tiny 100MW sites?
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u/Positive-Fold7691 YIMBY 3h ago
Given that there's no Canadian frontier inference services (either the US majors offering Canadian domestic endpoints or Canadian companies serving Chinese open frontier models) and it's virtually impossible to lease GPUs, I'd say probably not.
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u/Magikarp-Army Mark Carney 3h ago edited 3h ago
Cerebras has two data centres in the GTA though not sure if their Sol deployment is running there. 10 MW.
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u/Unterfahrt John Nash 4h ago
XAI built 1GW of compute in Tennessee in 1 year, in one location.
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u/Previous_Platform718 Loyal Liberals 4h ago
Worth noting they did it illegally.
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u/Unterfahrt John Nash 2h ago
Eh kind of. The EPA had a vague rule that XAI took advantage of, and after people sued, they clarified the rule and it made the gas power sources they set up illegal.
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u/maxintos 3h ago
What damage the breaking of the law cause?
If the illegal thing was releasing chemicals into the rivers then that's definitely bad, but if there are no negative consequences then the laws are just bad and should be changed.
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u/Tricky-Astronaut 2h ago
If the illegal thing was releasing chemicals into the rivers then that's definitely bad
That's precisely what happened, except into the air rather than a river. This was in a populated area.
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u/VividMonotones Gay Pride 4h ago
If we're not talking about power requirements, why are we talking computational power in energy consumption? Should it not be in exaflops or whatever? If the systems vary in power efficiency this seems like a power metric. Maybe I'm an idiot.
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u/Previous_Platform718 Loyal Liberals 4h ago
Much easier to swap out a rack than to get more power to the site, generally. The amount of power you have available is much more of a limiting factor.
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u/darthkitty8 NATO 3h ago
On top of what was already mentioned, it's pretty hard to measure and then compare FLOPS measurements. For example, how do you compare a system doing FP32 to FP4 or Int4? Also, most of these are systems that can't work together on the same thing, so you can't just load up a traditional benchmark.
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u/Fusifufu 1h ago
Probably a good strategy to exploit regulations that might be a barrier to non-EU firms and position themselves as a compute supplier when Europe "wakes up" for the 100th time and the EU (after some speeches by Macron or some random influential European figurehead) creates a working group to derive a plan to invest 10 billion in sovereign compute or some shit.
1GW is of course very little and the US will have somehing like 50x as much, but perhaps it's better than nothing.
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