‘Getting control where we can’—Europe wants sovereign AI but most of the chips are from the U.S.

The promise of sovereign AI is that a country can keep its models, data, and compute power at home. But there’s one critical component that has to come from outside: the chips. “Today, there is no equivalent in Europe,” said Timothée Lacroix, cofounder and chief technology officer of French AI company Mistral AI, referring to the GPUs, CPUs, TPUs, and other types of advanced chips that are for the most part made by U.S. companies. “I’m sure there are many alternatives that are going to be built, and we’ll help them out if that’s the case, but today it’s really about getting control where we can,” Lacroix said at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen on Monday. Mistral has spent the past year extending beyond models and into infrastructure, with 50 megawatts of its own compute due this summer. The sovereign rationale is control at every layer of the technology “To me, it’s really about giving our customers the choice on all layers of the stack for where they want to run what part of their workflow,” Lacroix said. That includes private, agent-driven work on a company’s own premises, and heavier inference hosted inside a customer’s own country “for strategic autonomy.” But silicon remains a missing piece of the sovereign AI puzzle. Lacroix said it’s a bit too early for three-year old Mistral to start thinking about designing its own Europe-based chip. However “if someone designs a great chip for transformers,” Mistral would likely be users. “There are European companies that are up and coming, and in that case, we like to talk to them and help them out,” said Lacroix. “It’s always a longer game.” More from Fortune’s 25th Brainstorm Tech: Anthropic’s Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, says there are days he manages tens of thousands of AI agents at once Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf says economic warfare is the ‘new normal’ for military conflicts—and the U.S. needs to get serious Twitch CEO: Social media has become ‘antis