Ecosia, the German search engine, is dropping Mistral in favor of open-weight models – Alibaba’s Qwen, Z.ai’s GLM and Moonshot AI’s Kimi – served through Melious, a German AI platform. Christian Kroll, the founder and chief executive, confirmed the move in an interview with EU-Startups.
After parting ways with OpenAI, Ecosia brought Mistral on in May, but Kroll said repeated technical faults, including overloaded servers, and underwhelming output quality pushed the company to look elsewhere. The Melious setup now opens a menu of models instead of tying Ecosia to a single developer.
That the models are Chinese drew notice, and Kroll rejected the framing. Open weights, he argued, cut cost, add flexibility and use less energy – the last point dovetailing with Ecosia’s environmental mission.
On censorship, Kroll said sensitive subjects such as questions about Taiwan can be routed to alternative models, and the company is working to strip political bias from its AI answers. The models run on European, low-carbon infrastructure, keeping data processing inside the EU and beyond the reach of the US CLOUD Act.
Kroll also questioned Mistral’s own European standing, saying its dependence on foreign investors undercuts its independence. Mistral raised a €3B Series D in September, led by Samsung Electronics at a valuation above €21B, with Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures also participating.
The spat lays bare an awkward question for Europe’s AI push: sovereignty turns on where the compute sits and who controls it, not merely where a model was trained.
