Samsung is in advanced discussions to invest up to €1 billion in Paris-based AI startup Mistral, a move that could value the company at approximately €20 billion ($22.9 billion), according to reports from the Financial Times and Reuters. The proposed investment is part of a larger €3 billion Series D funding round that would nearly double Mistral’s valuation in under a year, following a €1.7 billion Series C round last September led by ASML that valued it at €11.7 billion.
The round is expected to be led or co-led by EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund, a €5 billion vehicle launched by the European Union to address late-stage capital gaps. For Samsung, the world’s largest memory chip maker, the strategic rationale extends beyond capital—securing a preferential hardware supplier for training large AI models at a time when high-bandwidth memory is increasingly scarce. This mirrors a similar tie-up between Anthropic and Micron in June.
The talks come just a day after Mistral signed a multibillion-dollar agreement with Microsoft to expand its European data centers, which will run on thousands of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs. Microsoft also added Mistral’s Medium 3.5 and OCR 4 models to its Foundry platform and Copilot Studio. Mistral, founded in 2023 by ex-Google DeepMind and Meta researchers, positions itself as a sovereign European alternative to US and Chinese AI labs, and already holds a defense framework with the French military.
