Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch has proposed a strategic South Korea-Europe partnership to build an independent AI base outside the U.S.-China rivalry. He said the alliance could protect technological sovereignty by combining Europe’s AI capabilities with South Korea’s advanced manufacturing and engineering strengths. Mistral’s sovereign AI strategy allows customers to retain control of data, models and computing environments, while its open-source approach lets companies run and adapt models on internal servers. That could help manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics process sensitive semiconductor production data without sending it externally. The proposed partnership follows a decision by Samsung Electronics, ASML and European funds to invest 3 billion euros, approximately 4.68 trillion Korean won, in a framework for AI collaboration. Mensch said growing dependence on a small number of U.S. providers creates pricing, policy, operational and security risks as AI systems take on core business processes. He argued that South Korea and Europe could combine capital, manufacturing expertise and technical talent to develop large frontier models and complex local reasoning systems.