You don't understand the current AI race if you don't think about it in terms of compute - and compute clearly distinguishes 3 tiers of companies. Arthur Mensch, Mistral's CEO, recently had a hearing at the French Assemblée Nationale. He elegantly framed the AI race as a compute issue, where sovereignty would be ~"the ability to get leverage along the AI value chain" from electrons to tokens. He also provided numbers (in MW) for Mistral's available compute : I was surprised at how low these numbers were compared to the gargantuan numbers touted by US labs. So I ran the numbers, based on the recent and excellent @EpochAIResearch study, adding in my (not that reliable) AI-powered estimates of Chinese compute (see assumptions in blog post). And I found out that there are 3 quite separate tiers. 1. US Champions are really far ahead. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google each command multiple gigawatts (OpenAI ~15 GW once you count the Stargate/Azure/Oracle capacity it rents). Ever wondered why their Claude/GPT /Gemini consistently top benchmarks? Now you know. By the way, tick in Meta and xAI and you'll see them entering tier 1 too with their recent buildouts. 2. Chinese giants scale fast. Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, Huawei and the three state telcos are racing from hundreds of MW toward multi-GW, increasingly on domestic Ascend silicon and the national "East Data West Compute" grid. They report "computing power" in EFLOPS rather than MW, so their points here are estimates, could be quite off the mark. 3. The contenders. Europe's Mistral commands ~90 MW today and aims at 1 GW by 2029, an order of magnitude behind the leaders. Interestingly, some of the best Chinese labs (DeepSeek, Moonshot, Zhipu, MiniMax) have no longstanding compute : they are pure-play : they rent or get allocations from government capacity for specific efforts. DeepSeek (~90 MW, the only one of this category that owns its cluster) is the largest. With all that said, I hope someday someone in Europe wakes up to the absolute necessity of building compute faster than we do today. If you want to go inspect the graph, I've got the interactive version and full sources in my blog post, link below.
