Samsung Leads $3.5B Round Valuing Mistral at $24B

Mensch told CNBC the company intends to own its compute outright over time. "Long term, the plan is to fully rely on capacity that we are building ourselves, and so that means that the amount of compute that we own is going to grow ... around 100% in the next five years," he said. He added that Mistral will train "bigger and faster models."

On revenue, Mensch said he expects "to be beating" the $1 billion figure "if everything happens as they are trending," but declined to give a revised number. He said the raise is "also accelerating and enabling further growth down the line in 2027."

On Chinese competition, Mensch argued the field is unstable for enterprise buyers: "At this point in time, we are seeing that the volatility in this space is actually quite extreme." Customers, he said, want a guarantee that better models will exist a year from now — "and the only way we can provide that guarantee is by continuing to train our models ourselves."

The Financial Times framed the round as a record European AI raise landing while the continent strains to keep pace with US and Chinese rivals.