# Cerebras vs Mistral AI

> Cerebras is the fastest public host, near 3,000 tokens per second on GPT-OSS 120B, but lists two shared models. Mistral offers range and deployment control.

Canonical: https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/cerebras-vs-mistral-ai · By The Subconscious Team · Updated September 30, 2026

## How they compare

Cerebras's wafer-scale chip lists GPT-OSS 120B near 3,000 tokens per second at $0.35 in and $0.75 out. Its public shared catalog is just GPT-OSS 120B and Gemma 4 31B, with more on dedicated endpoints and through OpenRouter, Hugging Face, Vercel and AWS Marketplace. Mistral's catalog is its own family: Small 4 at $0.15 in and $0.60 out undercuts Cerebras's GPT-OSS price, Large 3 costs $0.50 in and $1.50 out, and Medium 3.5 at $1.50 in and $7.50 out targets agentic coding, with 77.6% on SWE-Bench Verified by Mistral's count. All carry 256K context. Cerebras also offers the only wafer-scale path to a closed frontier model, via OpenAI's Ultrafast GPT-5.6 Sol preview.

Speed matters most when generation is the wait. For voice, live autocomplete and streaming UIs, Cerebras is hard to beat, though its speed helps little when an agent mostly waits on tools or hidden reasoning. Mistral fits workloads that need a specific model, a residency guarantee or a portable deployment. Its EU and US regional endpoints went GA in August 2026 with a Priority Tier carrying uptime SLAs, the weights self-host with NVIDIA NIM containers, and the models sit on Azure, Bedrock, Vertex AI, Snowflake Cortex and watsonx. Cerebras's tiny self-serve catalog means most models start with a sales conversation. Mistral adds Codestral, OCR and Voxtral.

## What each one does

### Cerebras

Cerebras builds a single chip the size of a silicon wafer, and its inference cloud is the fastest public host on the models it serves. Its developer table lists GPT-OSS 120B near 3,000 tokens per second, about six times Groq on the same weights, at $0.35 in and $0.75 out per million. The public shared catalog is thin, just GPT-OSS 120B and Gemma 4 31B as of August 2026. More model families live on dedicated endpoints and through partners like OpenRouter, Hugging Face, Vercel and AWS Marketplace.

### Mistral AI

Mistral AI is a Paris lab that sells its models through La Plateforme, its own API, and releases most of them as open weights. It consolidated the lineup in 2026. Mistral Medium 3.5, released April 28, is a dense 128B model that merges instruction following, reasoning and coding into one set of weights, and it replaced both Devstral 2 and the Magistral reasoning models. It costs $1.50 in and $7.50 out per million tokens and scores 77.6% on SWE-Bench Verified by Mistral's count. Mistral Small 4, a 119B mixture-of-experts model with 6.5B active, costs $0.15 in and $0.60 out. Mistral Large 3, a 675B MoE under Apache 2.0, runs $0.50 in and $1.50 out. All three carry a 256K context window.

## Which is best, and when

### Choose Cerebras for

- Streaming UIs where tokens per second is the bottleneck
- Long generated outputs on GPT-OSS 120B
- Wafer-scale access to GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast

### Choose Mistral AI for

- Self-serve access to a full model lineup
- Data residency via EU regional endpoints
- Cheap volume on Small 4

## At a glance

| Attribute | Cerebras | Mistral AI |
|---|---|---|
| Model access | Open weights | Open weights, plus closed Codestral |
| Flagship models | GPT-OSS 120B, Gemma 4 31B | Mistral Medium 3.5, Small 4, Large 3 |
| Speed | ~3,000 tok/s on GPT-OSS 120B | - |
| Price | $0.35 in, $0.75 out (GPT-OSS 120B) | $0.15–$1.50 in, $0.60–$7.50 out per 1M |
| Customization | - | Forge (enterprise); fine-tuning API deprecated |
| Deployment | Shared API, dedicated, partners | API, Azure, Bedrock, Vertex, self-host |
| Long context | - | 256K |

## FAQ

### What is the difference between Cerebras and Mistral AI?

Cerebras is the fastest public host, near 3,000 tokens per second on GPT-OSS 120B, but lists two shared models. Mistral offers range and deployment control.

### When should I choose Cerebras over Mistral AI?

Streaming UIs where tokens per second is the bottleneck; Long generated outputs on GPT-OSS 120B; Wafer-scale access to GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast.

### When should I choose Mistral AI over Cerebras?

Self-serve access to a full model lineup; Data residency via EU regional endpoints; Cheap volume on Small 4.

### Is Cerebras or Mistral AI cheaper?

Cerebras: $0.35 in, $0.75 out (GPT-OSS 120B). Mistral AI: $0.15–$1.50 in, $0.60–$7.50 out per 1M. The cheaper choice depends on the model and workload.

## Running long-horizon agents?

If your agents run past 200K tokens, compare both against Subconscious: [Subconscious vs Cerebras](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/subconscious-vs-cerebras.md), [Subconscious vs Mistral AI](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/subconscious-vs-mistral-ai.md).

Full profiles: [Cerebras](https://www.subconscious.dev/providers/cerebras.md), [Mistral AI](https://www.subconscious.dev/providers/mistral-ai.md).