How does it help EU companies?
Just think about a defense contractor. Choosing trustworthy vendors is crucial to them. They can't just use a random provider from Open Router. They need to vet and certify their vendors. If they already have Mistral on the list of approved vendors, they can now just switch to the most recent open weight LLM if Mistral starts serving it.
The government can just force release, even if it's on European servers.
This is also where the words of law and pragmatic reality intercede.
Sovereignty does not always require self-hosting; sometimes it just requires deployments that meet your control requirements. For organizations that prefer a managed service, Mistral Large 4 is available through Microsoft Foundry, with private deployment options for Azure developers.
> ... As opposed to sending to Anthropic, Microsoft or Google. Granted, those companies can assert that data will stay in the EU region too, but they'd have to be believed, which, some may find tricky lately
CLOUD Act -> "but they'd have to be believed"
There is a similar thing happening now on a smaller scale for Canadian companies that want to migrate off USA-based platforms for all sorts of SaaS and reasons.