French artificial intelligence startup and leading European rival to OpenAI and Anthropic, Mistral AI‘s CEO, Arthur Mensch, warned Europe has a two-year window to build an independent AI infrastructure before losing control to American tech giants.

Europe’s Digital Sovereignty Clock Is Ticking

“It will be decided in the next two years,” Mensch said Tuesday during a French National Assembly hearing on digital sovereignty, Business Insider reported. Without urgent action, he cautioned, Europe risks becoming “a vassal state” entirely dependent on U.S.-sourced digital services.

“Once supply is monopolized by American players, suddenly we no longer have supply and we can no longer transform electrons into tokens,” he said.

Mensch framed the threat as fundamentally an energy and compute battle. “The one who controls the chips, who controls the electrons, who has massive access to energy — that’s the one who wins,” he said, noting U.S. firms are deploying roughly $1 trillion next year alone.

According to the report, Mensch also flagged Europe’s fragmented regulations and shallow capital markets as critical structural barriers to competing at scale.

Europe's Most Valuable AI Startup

Founded in Paris in 2023 by former Google DeepMind and Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) researchers Arthur Mensch, Chief Science Officer Guillaume Lample and Chief Technology Officer Timothée Lacroix, Mistral AI is valued at approximately $14 billion.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) initiated coverage on Mistral AI, describing the Paris-based startup as Europe’s most valuable artificial intelligence company.

Mistral AI is also a founding member of the Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) Nemotron Coalition, a global initiative to co-develop open-source frontier AI models, combining Mistral’s model architecture with NVIDIA’s compute resources and synthetic-data generation pipelines.

Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

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