Samsung May Invest €1 Billion in Mistral AI as Valuation Nears €20 Billion

Samsung Electronics is in negotiations to invest around €1 billion in French startup Mistral AI, the Financial Times reports. The deal would reportedly be part of a larger funding round that would value Mistral at roughly €20 billion.

Talks are at an advanced stage, but neither side has confirmed the deal is finalized. Mistral's previous round, closed in September 2025 and worth €1.7 billion, valued the company at €11.7 billion and was led by Dutch semiconductor equipment maker ASML, which became the startup's largest shareholder at the time.

Chips and Models Bundled Together

For Samsung, the Mistral investment fits into a broader strategy of pairing hardware manufacturing with access to leading language models. The company is the world's largest memory chipmaker and is separately negotiating a deal to produce custom AI chips for Anthropic. A stake in Mistral would also give it a foothold on the European side of the AI model market.

In return, Mistral would gain access to Samsung's memory technology and computing power, along with potential distribution of its products through the Korean giant's consumer devices and enterprise offerings. A similar arrangement already exists with Nvidia, which signed a strategic partnership agreement with Mistral, and with ASML, which took a stake as part of a broader technology deal.

Mistral Growing Faster Than Rivals

The French startup, founded in 2023 by former DeepMind and Meta researchers, has consistently positioned itself as Europe's answer to American and Chinese large language model providers. CEO Arthur Mensch has said the company's annual revenue will top $1 billion this year.

Growth has been fueled in part by an expanded partnership with Microsoft, which pledged billions in computing infrastructure support for Mistral. The startup is also scaling up its GPU resources, drawing on thousands of Nvidia Vera Rubin chips, with its services available through Microsoft Azure, including air-gapped versions built for regulated sectors.

Europe's Tech Sovereignty

The investment fits into a broader trend in which hardware and infrastructure makers are taking stakes in AI model developers, tying chip and memory suppliers to specific research labs. For Europe, Mistral remains one of the few homegrown players able to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google DeepMind, making it a key piece of the EU's push for technological independence.

Mistral's rising valuation stands in contrast to the caution many European companies show toward AI adoption, a trend regularly noted in industry reports. Still, the startup holds a leading position among the small number of European labs that have managed to attract capital comparable to their American rivals, even though it remains many times smaller than OpenAI or Anthropic in valuation terms.

What Comes Next

The final shape of the round, including Samsung's participation, has not yet been confirmed by either side. For Polish and European companies weighing language model deployments, though, the deal means Mistral is gaining another major hardware partner, potentially widening the availability of its services across clouds and devices built on Samsung technology.