Feb 6 (Reuters) - Cerebras Systems, an artificial

intelligence chip firm backed by UAE tech conglomerate G42, said

on Thursday it has partnered with France's Mistral and has

helped the European AI player achieve a speed record.

Mistral, a maker of open-source AI technology, is aiming to

challenge fellow open-source contenders Meta Platforms ( META )

and China's DeepSeek, which rocked global markets late last

month with claims of cutting-edge performance at low cost. All

three compete with ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

On Thursday, Mistral released an app called Le Chat that it

said can respond to user questions with 1,000 words per second.

Cerebras said 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 ( NVDA ) for training AI models. But the

partnership with Mistral on Thursday 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, said Cerebras Chief Executive Andrew Feldman.

"You want better answers. And to get better answers, you

need more compute at inference time," Feldman told Reuters. "It

was our first announced major win at a tier-one model maker, and

so we're really proud of that."