> tremendous amounts of inference capacity become open for pennies on the dollar.

They can't be operated for pennies on the dollar, though. The likely current status is that these products are subsidized to disregard model cost, and part of the operating cost.

If the bubble bursts, inference that can't be made profitable when factoring in operating costs will be scraped, not sold for pennies.

I don't necessarily agree that's likely, but is it even the case that Mistral is more expensive than GPT or Claude? My understanding is that it's cheaper, which means it would fare worse in the scenario you're describing, unless they've perfectly calibrated the quality-cost tradeoff better than any American company.