Samsung is in talks to invest hundreds of millions of euros in French artificial intelligence start-up Mistral, a move that would strengthen the company’s push to become a leading alternative to US technology groups, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday July 22, citing people familiar with the matter.
The South Korean conglomerate is discussing a stake in Mistral as part of a broader fundraising round that could value the Paris-based group at roughly 20 billion euros ($22.81 billion), according to the FT’s sources.
Samsung, which has previously backed Mistral through its venture arm, could put in about 1 billion euros under the new round, one person told the newspaper.
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The talks come as AI developers race to lock in partnerships with semiconductor suppliers, with the industry struggling to keep pace with surging demand for computing power.
Mistral is looking to tap growing interest from both European and Asian companies and governments seeking alternatives to leading US AI models, after Washington last month restricted foreign access to Anthropic’s latest Mythos and Fable models, fueling a wave of interest in “sovereign AI” capacity, the FT reported.
Since its founding, Mistral has built its business around open models that customers can adapt and control themselves.
Mistral is seeking to raise several billion euros overall in the new round, less than a year after it was valued at 12 billion euros in a deal led by Dutch chipmaking-equipment giant ASML, the FT said. Swedish investor EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund, which is backed by Brussels and manages more than 5 billion euros from investors including Novo Holdings and Santander, is also in talks to join the round, according to the report, which noted that Sifted had previously reported on EQT’s involvement.
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Talks remain fluid and no final decisions have been made, the FT’s sources cautioned. Mistral, Samsung and EQT all declined to comment.
Mistral’s valuation still trails far behind US rivals such as Anthropic, Reuters noted separately. The group raised 1.7 billion euros in September last year largely from ASML and secured $830 million in debut debt financing earlier this year to fund Nvidia-powered data centers in Europe.
The startup disclosed in February this year that its annualized recurring revenue had risen to more than $400 million from just $20 million a year earlier, and chief executive Arthur Mensch said that the company is on track to top $1 billion in ARR by year-end.
That growth has given Mensch a platform in forums ranging from Davos to the French Parliament, where he has positioned himself as a voice for AI systems kept out of the hands of centralized state or corporate control.
In a LinkedIn post, he described Mistral’s core business as deploying its models and agent platform on enterprise customers’ own infrastructure and helping them train custom models through its Forge platform.
The company’s model line-up spans large language, multimodal, reasoning, audio and OCR systems, including smaller edge-focused models such as the Ministraux family, alongside open-source tools such as its Leanstral code agent.
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Mistral’s discussions with Samsung follow an expanded partnership this week with Microsoft, an early investor, under which the US software giant committed to a multibillion-dollar deal to use Mistral’s computing infrastructure which is a step up from the $15 million investment and Azure distribution deal the two struck in 2024.
The Microsoft deal, which will see thousands of Nvidia’s latest Vera Rubin chips added to Mistral’s capacity, gives the French group a stable revenue stream it can borrow against to fund further expansion.
Separately, Reuters reported that US memory manufacturer Micron invested in Anthropic last month as part of a broader partnership covering long-term memory and storage supply.
Mistral, though, faces mounting competition from lower-cost Chinese rivals, with Moonshot’s latest Kimi model reviving concerns that the gap with frontier US systems is narrowing.
