Europe wants its answer to American artificial intelligence, and that answer is still called Mistral. The French AI lab is in early talks to raise around 3 billion euros (3.5 billion dollars), which would value the company at 20 billion euros - nearly double the 11.7 billion from last year's funding round.

The number sounds impressive until you place it next to the competition. Mistral has so far raised around 4 billion dollars in total. For comparison, America's OpenAI has taken 186 billion, and Anthropic 161 billion dollars. That is not a difference in class, it is a difference in league - and it shows exactly how far ahead the American labs have gone in revenue, in model adoption and in corporate demand.

Mistral launched in 2023 with the slogan "advanced artificial intelligence in everyone's hands", and unlike its American rivals, it offers some of its models with open weights - anyone can adapt them as they like. But the company's real trump card is not the technology, it is the politics. As European states increasingly distance themselves from American technology, Mistral sells itself as a "sovereign", home-grown, closer alternative.

And here business turns into geopolitics. The company is building a data centre near Paris and has already signed deals with the French army, the government of Luxembourg and several large European firms. When a state entrusts the artificial intelligence of its own military to a domestic firm rather than an American giant, that is no longer a technological choice - it is a question of control. Will Europe finally invest enough to have its own tool, or is 20 billion just an entry ticket to a table where others play with stakes ten times higher? The Balkans watch this from afar, as they watch everything - after the others have already decided.