(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."