Ecosia drops Mistral for open-weight models, citing quality, capacity and sovereignty

Berlin-based search engine Ecosia is replacing Mistral AI, which it adopted in May in place of OpenAI, with open-weight models, including China's Qwen, GLM and Kimi, Politico reported on 6 October 2026. Ecosia founder and CEO Christian Kroll said the models are hosted on the Melious platform and that Ecosia has roughly halved its costs while improving quality and performance.

Why did Ecosia leave? Kroll said he is disappointed with Mistral's quality, which he called "a year behind" the competition, and that overloaded servers caused recurring technical problems because Ecosia was "too large a customer". He also questioned whether Mistral is "truly sovereign" given its international investors, such as Samsung and Nvidia, and cited the large share of nuclear power in France's energy mix against Ecosia's environmental goals.

Context: The news came days after Mistral released Large 4. Mistral co-founder Guillaume Lample invited Ecosia to test the new model, and CEO Arthur Mensch replied on X that Mistral serves those open models too, adding "Sorry if using nuclear energy is a real blocker." The episode shows how hard it is to build a competitive, sovereign European AI stack; Kroll sees open-weight models as a chance for Europe to build without funding frontier training runs.

Sources: Politico Europe; heise online