Don't get me wrong, I do wish Mistral's models were competitive with the Chinese ones. But right now, they simply aren't, and might never be in the future.

If you want the best option available while keeping your data within the EU, running a Chinese open weights model on hardware within the EU is likely the way to go.

Why would anyone want to use Chinese tech is a mystery. There are too many geopolitical issues which makes it a risk. It is just not viable anymore to sign multimillion €$£ contracts with the companies originating from there. Scientific collab for sure but not more. I am not talking about toy applications here. Any significant deployment requires support etc from a provider. If data is very sensitive then doing confidential AI might be a better focus.

Competitive how? Is coding the only use case people talk about the best model?

That's very short-term. Whilst using whatever models now, Europe should be investing in catching-up before the inevitable future enshitification of the US models and the future political collision with both the US and China.