Yep, and the comparison relies on key people believing the valuations.
Lots of mature companies will want their providers to be reasonably sheltered from the fallout of a coming US AI bubble burst.
So long as they're sufficiently liquid at the right time, they don't really need to shelter more. They need to plan for a fire sale on the bulk of their operating expenses.
What that reveals is the loaded cost of inference being more expensive than they've been showing, not cheaper. The crash would be the end of subsidized costs to users, not the revelation that it's a high-margin operation.
Selling compute/inference at more of a loss will probably not fly in the context of bankruptcy manoeuvers. They will need to shed spending engagements instead. I imagine Mistral would rather buy out some of their Nvidia purchase agreements for a discount if they want to build additional capacity at that time. I also don't think they'd be interested in US datacenters at all. If they want them they can get that in Canada, with a better ally and less political + financial risks, which is kind of the Mistral segment already.
They can't be operated for pennies on the dollar, though. The likely current status is that these products are subsidized to disregard model cost, and part of the operating cost.
If the bubble bursts, inference that can't be made profitable when factoring in operating costs will be scraped, not sold for pennies.
By providing specialized long-term services to corporate clients, they are securing exactly that.