It makes sense in a political way but I'm not sure if it's the best choice for scientific development seeing as Mistral has been pretty behind the curve it's entire existence.

It makes more sense if they're the only company who was willing to work on a more custom solution for the proposed LHC model but I don't that a bit as it would be great PR for the frontier labs.

This seems a lot more like an effort to bolster European AI by moving CERN money into Mistral.