Samsung is in talks to invest hundreds of millions of euros in Mistral, the French AI start-up trying to become a serious alternative to US tech outfits.
According to the Financial Times, the South Korean conglomerate is discussing the investment as part of a broader fundraising round that could value Mistral at about €20 billion.
Samsung, which has already invested in Mistral through its venture arm, could put about €1 billion into the new round. The talks show how AI developers are scrambling for cosy relationships with semiconductor suppliers while demand for computing power races ahead of supply.
Mistral wants to cash in on growing interest from European and Asian companies and governments looking for alternatives to US AI models. That interest picked up after the Trump administration blocked foreign access to Anthropic’s latest Mythos and Fable models last month. The US export controls on Anthropic have stirred demand for “sovereign AI” capacity.
Since launch, Mistral has focused on “open” AI models that customers can customise and control, meaning no company or government can simply switch them off. Mistral is seeking to raise several billion euros in the new round, less than a year after it was valued at €12 billion in a deal led by Dutch chip equipment giant ASML.
Swedish investor EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund is in talks to join the fundraising round. The talks are still live; the terms could shift, and no final decision has been made. The Scaleup Europe Fund is expected to exceed €5 billion and is backed by the European Commission while being managed by EQT.
It has attracted private investors, including Novo Holdings and Santander, to fund promising European companies in competitive sectors such as AI.
The Paris-based outfit raised €1.7 billion in September, with most of the money coming from ASML. ASML is using Mistral’s AI models to speed up production of the sophisticated kit needed to make cutting-edge chips.
Earlier this year, Mistral raised $830 million in its first debt financing to support Nvidia-powered data centres across Europe. Mistral and Samsung previously discussed working together in AI memory, according to South Korean media reports in April.
Samsung is the world’s largest maker of memory chips and has seen profits jump during the past year as AI demand has shoved prices higher. But Mistral’s open models are being chased hard by China.
Moonshot’s latest Kimi model has triggered fresh worries that low-cost Chinese rivals are closing the gap with US frontier AI systems. Founded three years ago, Mistral has become Europe’s most valuable AI start-up.
Mistral is adding thousands of Nvidia’s latest Vera Rubin chips, while its newest models will be made available through Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service.
