Access to "sufficient electricity" and "quality data" are key for effective competition in artificial intelligence, the CEO of French AI company Mistral told the EU competition commissioner. Arthur Mensch met Teresa Ribera and members of her cabinet on Feb. 24 to talk primarily about competition policy and the Digital Markets Act, according to a readout published on Friday.
Effective competition in artificial intelligence means access to "sufficient electricity" and "quality data" are vital, the chief executive of French AI company Mistral told the EU's competition commissioner. Arthur Mensch met Teresa Ribera and members of her cabinet on Feb. 24, according to a readout published on Friday.
The meeting was about competition policy and the Digital Markets Act, or DMA, the EU law to rein in the market power of big tech, and Mensch discussed "competing with hyperscalers across the supply chain in digital markets," the document says.
Hyperscalers is a term for very large cloud service providers that operate globally distributed data center infrastructures and can scale computing resources rapidly and elastically. They commonly include companies such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
The commission is currently investigating whether to extend the DMA to the cloud businesses of Amazon and Microsoft.
The readout also noted Mistral's CEO cautioning that access to enough electricity and good-quality data are "essential for effective competition."
AI models' massive energy and data needs have increasingly come under the attention of antitrust authorities across the EU.
In a report published last December, the French authority said access to energy sources could become a barrier to entry or expansion, "particularly for smaller market participants" (see here).
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