Continental Europe had worse copyright laws since the 19th century. The US founding fathers were enlightenment age idealists, hence the copyright clause. European copyright laws were created by authoritarian empires. It's a major reason why we can't do tech. And I suspect also why Europe can't answer to the dominance of US culture.
Legal theft like the Mickey-Mouse-Protection-Law is controversial in the US. In the EU, it goes by without comment. That ends up giving casual observers an exactly reverse impression of the legal and social situation. Same for a lot of issues.

Yes, but that only puts an upper limit on the price that anyone would be willing to pay.
It's like this: Both companies estimate how much money they expect to make from using those servers for their own purposes. In Mistral's case, that might be a negative amount. Regardless, Microsoft obviously can put the capacity to better use. So they can offer to rent it from Mistral for more than Mistral believes it can make on its own. Basically, MS passes on some of their profits to Mistral.