Samsung is in talks to invest hundreds of millions of euros in French AI startup Mistral, in a funding round that could value the company near €20 billion.
Key Points:
- Samsung is weighing a stake in Mistral that would value the AI lab at roughly €20 billion.
- The reported cheque ranges from hundreds of millions of euros to about €1 billion.
- Mistral's valuation would nearly double from the €11.7 billion set less than a year ago.
Samsung Weighs Mistral Bet
Word of the discussions surfaced Wednesday, and news wires quickly relayed the account to markets. Samsung could write a cheque worth hundreds of millions of euros, though some reports pegged the sum closer to €1 billion. Neither company confirmed the talks, and both declined to comment when contacted by reporters.
The round stretches well beyond any single backer, since Mistral is chasing several billion euros in fresh capital at the €20 billion mark. Swedish investor EQT sits among the parties in talks through its Scaleup Europe Fund, alongside a widening list of strategic and sovereign names circling the raise.
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Samsung Memory Powers Bet
For Samsung, the logic runs straight through its memory business rather than any European flag-waving. The group supplies much of the high-bandwidth memory that trains and runs large models, so a foothold in a frontier lab would push it up the stack into software. The move would also mark Samsung's first direct bet on a foundation-model lab outside Google, whose Gemini models currently power its Galaxy AI features.
Mistral has its own reasons to welcome a chip maker onto the register. Chief executive Arthur Mensch has floated custom silicon to loosen the lab's grip on Nvidia, and a strategic partner with its own memory business is a useful name to court while the startup counts Airbus and BMW among its customers.
The timing is hard to miss, coming barely a day after Samsung folded its robotics projects into a new CEO-led division.
Mistral Valuation Doubles Quickly
The talks land as Europe hunts for a homegrown answer to American AI leaders.
Mistral still trails OpenAI and Anthropic, both valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and the €20 billion figure leans on regional appetite rather than any parity of performance.
A recent US move to pause foreign access to Anthropic's top models has sharpened that hunger, and governments across the bloc have begun steering procurement toward domestic suppliers.
Mistral has spent the past year assembling exactly the kind of backing a sovereignty pitch requires, from a September round that drew €1.7 billion at an €11.7 billion valuation led by chip-equipment maker ASML.
This week Microsoft committed billions more to run its models on the cloud, and an earlier debt facility is funding data centres in Paris and Sweden.
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