Hardware is definitely extremely important. Dig more into the topic and you'll understand where all those chips sold to Singapure went to.

Spoiler: they went to Thailand.

The competitive advantage of DeepSeek IMO were the engineers. Some pretty hard-core optimizations went out of their lab, and this is what I think is a major differentiator between success and failure. You can have all the HW you can wish for but if you don't have the right set of people you're not gonna make it. Many companies think that they have the right set of people but they don't.

If they do, who says they get to keep them? Hell, even if they do get to keep them, who says they're the still the right set of people in 5 years?

Mistral seems clearly sensible to keep around for some powerful and wealthy people, and I have no problem seeing why. They might not even all be Europeans.

Probably it’s not about gaining a competitive advantage but more about bringing down the costs to run frontier models in the EU to a level where it’s a viable enough option to bring down the risk of relying on the US and china entirely.