Elon Musk's xAI discussed partnership with Mistral to try and rival OpenAI

Musk's xAI eyed Europe's AI giant Mistral in a bid to challenge OpenAI and Anthropic, according to a report. Elon Musk’s company xAI reportedly held discussions in recent weeks with the French artificial intelligence company Mistral about a partnership to try and rival competitors such as Anthropic and OpenAI. The tie-up would have included the American code-editing startup Cursor, according to Business Insider, which cited people familiar with the matter. The report comes as Elon Musk’s other company, SpaceX, which owns xAI, announced a deal with Cursor this week that gives SpaceX the option to buy the company for $60 billion. Mistral AI is one of Europe’s most highly valued AI firms that develops large language models (LLMs). It is widely seen as the continent’s leading competitor in frontier models in the global AI race. Musk's AI company, which launched its Grok chatbot in 2023, has been ramping up its infrastructure and AI model performance. AI companies are in a race to build large clusters of GPUs, or interconnected chips, which can lead to more capable AI models developed at faster rates. In 2024, Musk built a supercomputer called “Colossus" in Memphis, Tennessee, in just three months. It is said to be the most powerful AI computing cluster in the world, with 200,000 GPUs running on Tesla Megapack batteries. Musk has said it plans to expand to 1 million GPUs. Euronews has reached out to Mistral and xAI for comment but did not receive a reply at the time of publication.