French artificial-intelligence firm, regarded as Europe's only real AI champion and the most coveted AI model-builder outside America and China. Run by Arthur Mensch. In September 2025 it secured a €1.3bn investment from ASML, a Dutch chip-industry giant. Mistral has a partnership with AMIAD, France's military-AI agency. Its Saba model is trained on data from the Middle East and South Asia, making it proficient in Arabic and smaller regional languages such as Tamil. In November 2025 the EU AI Champions Initiative unveiled a partnership between Mistral and Helsing, a German drone-maker, to adapt AI models for defence and security, announced at a Franco-German summit on digital sovereignty in Berlin.
He asked me if I knew what time it was -- I said yes, but not right now.