PARIS — When the CEO of Europe’s only real challenger to the top U.S.-based frontier labs arrived at last month’s exclusive G7 meeting on AI, he didn’t have algorithms or IPOs on his mind. He came to talk electricity.
Arthur Mensch, who runs Mistral AI, the hottest tech property of this year’s G7 host country, believes that France’s relatively cheap energy is a major competitive advantage in the AI race.
It’s a vision he laid out at the June 17 working lunch on AI in front of the likes of Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen, as well as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI boss Sam Altman: Unless Europe develops a system to direct its low-cost electricity resources into large language models of its own, it risks letting its energy advantage slip away.
“Electricity is the primary substrate,” he told POLITICO in a phone call after the lunch in the French lakeside town of Évian-les-Bains. “You have to control the infrastructure, and Europe is relatively well-positioned.”
