Sovereignty. Having a European company means others can't as easily take it away.

This is one thing the EU can learn from China. Lots of "expert" smash China for duplicating/"copying" stuff that the west was already doing, better. They criticize that it's wasteful spending etc. They don't get it. It's about sovereignty, so you're not at the whims of whomever wants to sanction you for whatever frivolous reasons. The EU is now learning what it means when it can't rely on the US for everything anymore.

It doesn't matter that it isn't as good as the competition right now. Human capital takes time and effort to cultivate. There is strategic reason to keep Mistal alive even if it's not very commercially competitive.

I hope our EU leaders can see this too, commit for the long term, and don't just look at financial balance sheets.

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jansenmac 6 days ago | parent [-]

Still, sovereignty is a very vague concept. ASML is Dutch, has a near monopoly in the market of lithographic Chip design but it's the Americans deciding if it can sell to China. Also, ASML is very dependent on an American supplier.

Likewise, Mistrall is using NVIDIA all over the place and has used the NVIDIA cloud for training and inferencing. Mistrals partnership with NVIDIA does not seem any different to me when compared to AWS European Sovereign cloud.

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anarticle 6 days ago | parent [-]

Like any elephant, you eat it one piece at a time. They probably can’t big bang this project. Now more than ever, EU could lose access to OpenAI et al overnight.

	▲	FooBarWidget 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly. This is where vision and commitment comes in. It's just a starting point. China was hugely dependent on foreign semiconductor imports, and their domestic semiconductor companies were laughable. Chinese companies were entirely unmotivated to help with sovereignty and just sourced from the global market because it's so easy. All the Chinese government succeeded in doing was keeping a minimum talent pool alive. But the US sanction flipped something in the collective consciousness, and Chinese companies finally took the threat seriously. For the past 6 years they have worked tirelessly to de-Americanize the supply chain. Every step was criticized by western "experts" as "oh this doesn't mean much"/"still need ASML/Lam Research/whatever". And they're right, when viewed each step in isolation. Some projects failed, so it was 3 steps forward 1 step back. But now, 6 years later, they're on the cusp of being sanction-proof and even taking a good chunk of global market share. The reason why the latest two rounds of US semiconductor sanctions didn't completely kill off the Chinese semiconductor industry, and Chinese semiconductor equipment companies kept growing 100%-200% per year, was exactly because 1) the Chinese government kept the minimum talent pool alive even during peaceful times, and 2) they started ramping up de-Americanization a few years before the worst attacks hit. I hope the EU leaders recognize this partnership is a start and don't just pat themselves on the back with "we've done it, let's bask in electoral glory". Chinese leadership have regular study sessions to study foreign states' policies and their effectiveness. EU leaders should be humble, smart and motivated enough to do the same rather than winging things based on vibes.