Mistral Large 3 Environmental Impact
Leading open-weight frontier model — 675B total / 41B active, Apache 2.0
- Architecture
- Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (multimodal, multilingual)
- Parameters
- 675B
- Context
- 256,000 tokens
- Provider
- Mistral AI
Energy per query
1.5 Wh
5x more than a Google search (0.3 Wh)
CO2 per query
0.95 g
France grid (50 gCO₂/kWh)
Water per query
6 mL
~161 queries to fill 1 litre
Processing location
Mistral AI (France) / self-hosted
Provider
Mistral AI
Category
Text / Chat
Grid carbon intensity
50 g CO2/kWh (90% renewable)
How does Mistral Large 3 compare?
Detailed Breakdown
Energy Consumption
Mistral Large 3 is the leading open-weight frontier model at 675B total parameters with only 41B active per token (MoE). At ~1.5 Wh per query, it's remarkably efficient for its capability level thanks to the sparse architecture. Multimodal and multilingual, Apache 2.0 licensed.
Power Source & Carbon
Mistral's own API runs from France (50 g CO2/kWh — among the cleanest grids globally due to nuclear power). Self-hosted deployments benefit from the MoE architecture requiring less active compute.
Water Usage
At ~6.2 mL per query. European data centres generally have good water efficiency.
About Mistral Large 3
Mistral Large 3 is an open-source text and chat model from Mistral AI, released in December 2, 2025, that runs well below the category average for energy consumption at 1.5 Wh per query. Because its weights are publicly available, it can be self-hosted on any infrastructure — meaning its carbon footprint depends entirely on where and how you choose to run it. At 675B parameters, it leading open-weight frontier model — 675b total / 41b active, apache 2.0.
Mistral Large 3 benefits from running in France, one of the cleaner grid regions in our dataset at 50 gCO₂/kWh with 90% renewable energy. The same model running in a coal-heavy region would produce significantly more carbon per query.
These figures are estimates derived from hardware specifications and API benchmarks — Mistral AI has not published official energy data for Mistral Large 3. Actual consumption may vary significantly depending on batching, quantisation, and infrastructure optimisations that we cannot observe from outside.
Mistral Large 3 in Context
Your yearly Mistral Large 3 footprint
At 25 queries per day, your annual Mistral Large 3 usage consumes 13.7 kWh — roughly what a fridge uses in a month. That produces 8.7 kg of CO₂.
Key Insights
Mistral AI Mistral Family
How energy efficiency has evolved across versions.
What does your Mistral Large 3 usage cost the planet?
Use our calculator to estimate your personal environmental footprint based on how often you use Mistral Large 3.
Calculate My ComputeFrequently Asked Questions
How much energy does Mistral Large 3 use per query?
Each Mistral Large 3 query consumes approximately 1.5 Wh of energy. This is 5x more than a traditional Google search (~0.3 Wh).
What is Mistral Large 3's carbon footprint?
Based on the carbon intensity of Mistral AI (France) / self-hosted, each query produces approximately 0.95 g of CO2. The grid in this region has a carbon intensity of 50 g CO2/kWh with 90% renewable energy.
How much water does Mistral Large 3 use?
Each query consumes approximately 6 mL of water, primarily used for cooling the data centers that process the request.
How does Mistral Large 3 compare to a Google search?
A Mistral Large 3 query uses 5x more than a Google search in terms of energy. A Google search uses approximately 0.3 Wh, while Mistral Large 3 uses 1.5 Wh.
Technical Details
Architecture
Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (multimodal, multilingual)
Parameters
675B
Context window
256,000 tokens
Release date
2025-12-02
Open source
Yes
Training data cutoff
2025-11