OVHcloud wants to take on Mistral with its own AI, but won't say when it will ship

On October 20, the day of its annual results, Octave Klaba spoke twice about the same artificial intelligence. To the daily La Tribune, the founder and CEO of OVHcloud said the cloud provider was finishing training the first version of its large language model and planned to release it as open source "in late November." To the news agency Reuters, he mentioned a launch in early 2027, without talking about open source.

The two statements are not necessarily mutually exclusive, since releasing the weights can come before a commercial offering, but OVHcloud has not said which one holds. One thing is certain: the French cloud provider wants to enter Mistral AI's territory.

What we know about the model

Very little. No name, size or test result has been published. According to Reuters, the model is based on a "mixture of experts" architecture: for each request, only some of its specialized subnetworks are used, which reduces the computing required. Octave Klaba described it to La Tribune as "different from the others, and very far ahead of its time in terms of architecture." No independent evaluation can yet verify that claim. Development began on Jupiter, the European supercomputer.

The announced targets are code, agents (finance, human resources, legal, logistics) and cybersecurity. On that last point, the CEO mentions defensive but also offensive uses, with models able to break into systems by chaining vulnerabilities, according to remarks reported from the interview. He says the first version will not cover all these targets exactly, and rules out medicine, for lack of in-house expertise and data.

First for its own needs

"We are making these models first for ourselves, with our data, not our customers' data," Octave Klaba says. Accuracy will matter for companies hosted at OVHcloud, which are often drawn by the promise of a European cloud. In parallel, the group is preparing the pilot of OVHai Workspace, a suite of email and business applications unveiled in June.

A bet backed by better results

The financial context helps. For the fiscal year ended in late August, OVHcloud reported revenue of €1.145 billion, up 7.2% organically, and is aiming for more than 10% in 2027. The stock jumped about 9% on the morning of October 20, according to BFM Bourse. The group has 250 megawatts of connected power capacity, 140 of which are in operation, and says it can take on new customers on about half of its cloud.

Octave Klaba remains harsh on Brussels. According to Reuters, he considers the proposed public commitment of €200 million over five years to buy AI services insufficient, and the month before he had called the European AI gigafactory projects "doomed to fail." This is close to the line taken by Mistral's CEO, who recently called on Europe to build its own frontier models.

What to watch in late November

For an IT manager, there is nothing to test for now. If the model is indeed released as open source in late November, three things will show whether it matters: the actual license of the weights, its size and therefore the hardware needed to run it, and evaluations run by parties other than OVHcloud against Mistral Large 4 and Chinese open models.