Samsung is negotiating to invest hundreds of millions of euros in AI start-up Mistral. This investment will help the French company impact the market and create a mainstream AI solution that can replace American technology giants.
According to people familiar with the matter, the South Korean conglomerate is negotiating to participate in a new round of financing for Mistral. After the completion of this round of financing, Mistral may be valued at about 20 billion euros.
Samsung, which has previously invested in Mistral through its venture capital arm, is expected to invest about 1 billion euros in the current round, one of the sources said.
This negotiation reflects the general trend of the industry: the demand for computing power is soaring and the supply of computing power continues to be in short supply. Major AI R&D companies are actively seeking to establish cooperation with semiconductor suppliers.
After the Trump administration banned foreign entities from accessing Anthropic's latest Mythos and Fable series models last month, companies and governments in Europe and Asia are increasingly looking to get rid of their dependence on leading American AI models. Mistral is taking this opportunity to attract capital from all parties.
The export controls imposed by the United States on Anthropic have set off a global upsurge in deploying sovereign AI capabilities. Mistral has focused on open source AI models since its inception. Customers can customize and control the models independently without being shut down remotely by companies or officials.
People familiar with the matter added that Mistral plans to raise billions of euros in a new round of financing. It is less than a year since the last round of financing, which was led by Dutch chip equipment giant ASML and the company's valuation reached 12 billion euros.
Sources said that Scaleup Europe Fund, a subsidiary of Swedish investment institution EQT, also participated in this round of financing negotiations. Relevant sources reminded that negotiations are still progressing, the terms may be changed, and a final decision has not been made; the media Sifted has previously reported on EQT’s relevant consultations.
The fund, which is expected to exceed 5 billion euros, is supported by the European Commission and managed by EQT. It also attracts investment from private investors such as Novo Holdings and Santander Bank, with the goal of supporting European companies with potential in competitive fields such as artificial intelligence.
Mistral, Samsung and EQT declined to comment.
Mistral's talks with Samsung come as the AI industry faces an unprecedented chip shortage. Suppliers of memory and various semiconductors used to run and train AI models are stepping up production expansion.
Last month, US memory manufacturer Micron invested in Anthropic, and the two parties reached a large-scale cooperation, including a long-term memory and storage supply agreement.
This week, Mistral expanded its partnership with Microsoft, one of its early investors. The U.S. software giant has committed “billions of dollars” to procure computing infrastructure services from the French AI startup.
This cooperation with Microsoft will provide Mistral with a stable source of income, and Mistral can rely on this cash flow to carry out financing to increase investment in computing power and deploy thousands of Nvidia's latest Vera Rubin chips. At the same time, Mistral’s latest series of models will also be available on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform.