It was the rumor of the summer in the San Francisco Bay Area: Apple had internally reviewed the Mistral AI file and was considering an acquisition of the French artificial intelligence (AI) star. The news was deemed credible enough for Reuters to issue a news wire on the matter. But things went no further – Mistral's phone did not ring, and, to set the record straight, the company is not for sale.

The story was both good and bad news. Bad for Apple, which had missed the opportunity in AI and is struggling to catch up. While it was long the world's largest company by market capitalization, it now trails behind Nvidia, the chip maker, and Microsoft, the backer of OpenAI, inventor of ChatGPT. Apple should be looking to develop its own AI model.

For Mistral AI, it was both an honor – a tribute to two young graduates of the École Polytechnique (Arthur Mensch and Guillaume Lample) and a French alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure (Timothée Lacroix), all with experience at Google or Meta, who succeeded in creating an AI champion in France – and a source of concern, as a taboo question arose: Can Mistral AI survive on its own?

The company has generated well-deserved excitement in France, where such successes are rare, to the point that Arthur Mensch was named a Chevalier of the Ordre National du Mérite in May. To date, Mistral AI has raised $1.1 billion (€935 million) in funding and was valued last year at $5.7 billion. According to Bloomberg, it is currently raising an additional $2 billion in a deal valuing it at $14 billion, which would make it one of the most highly valued start-ups in Europe.

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