Cerebras Systems, an artificial intelligence chip firm backed by UAE tech conglomerate G42, has partnered with France's Mistral and has helped the European AI player achieve a speed record.

Open-source AI developer Mistral plans to take on rival open-source competitors Meta Platforms and China's DeepSeek, which shocked international markets late last month with promises of state-of-the-art performance at a low price. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is a rival of all three.

On Thursday, Mistral released an app called Le Chat that it said can respond to user questions with 1,000 words per second.

Cerebras says it is providing the computer power behind those results, which it claimed makes Mistral the world's fastest AI assistant, ahead of both OpenAI and DeepSeek.

Silicon Valley-based Cerebras, which has filed for an initial public offering that is delayed while U.S. officials review G42's involvement with the firm, is one of the few challengers to Nvidia for training AI models. However the partnership with Mistral is for serving an app based on its model to users, a step called ‘inference’ in the AI industry.

“As rivals have closed in on matching OpenAI's models, the speed of delivering answers to users has become more of a priority,” says Cerebras Chief Executive Andrew Feldman.

“You want better answers. And to get better answers, you need more compute at inference time. It was our first announced major win at a tier-one model maker, and so we're proud of that,” adds Andrew.