The word empire is used for anything these days. Mistral is successful, but their market cap $14B is less than than revenue of OpenAI or Anthropic. They may not have the scale to compete with the American and the Chinese companies.

$14B "empire" next to a trillion dollar OpenAI, trillion dollar Anthropic, trillion dollar DeepMind... this is a massive failure, not an empire. It is truly baffling how low expectations are for European tech.