Samsung in talks with Mistral to double European AI giant's valuation

Samsung is in talks to invest up to €1 billion in Mistral, a move that would value the French AI company at €20 billion (about $22.9 billion), according to reports. 

If the round closes at that price, it would nearly double Mistral’s worth in under a year.

A Series D that reprices Mistral in ten months

The talks are part of a €3 billion Series D that Mistral is raising, according to a source with direct knowledge of the discussions. 

The terms are not final, and neither party has issued any statement on them. 

The €20 billion figure is a steep markup, as Mistral’s last equity raise was a €1.7 billion Series C in September, led by Dutch chip-equipment maker ASML, which valued the company at €11.7 billion (around $13.4 billion) and made ASML its largest shareholder. 

Mistral was founded in 2023 to give Europe a homegrown answer to US model makers and has pulled in more than $3.5 billion in debt and equity since then.

Samsung would not be the only name in the round. EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund, a €5 billion vehicle the European Union launched last year to plug the region’s shortage of late-stage capital, is in talks to lead or co-lead. 

Reports are estimating that Samsung’s check may be up to €1 billion ($1.14 billion).

Why a memory-chip maker is circling

For Mistral, Samsung is worth more than the cash. The South Korean group is one of the world’s largest makers of memory chips, a component needed to train large AI models, and supply has tightened as AI infrastructure spending climbs worldwide. 

Backing from Samsung would hand Mistral a strategic supplier at a moment when access to hardware, not ideas, is often the bottleneck.

The pattern is familiar. In June, Anthropic took a strategic investment from US memory maker Micron. Chipmakers and model builders are increasingly tying up directly, each hedging against the other’s scarcity.

Fresh off a multibillion-dollar Microsoft deal

The fundraising talks follow a July 21 agreement between Mistral and Microsoft. Under that deal, Microsoft said it would make a “multibillion-dollar” commitment to expand Mistral’s European data centers, which are being built on thousands of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs, and would rent compute from the startup rather than take new equity, Microsoft Vice Chair Brad Smith told Reuters. 

Microsoft also added Mistral’s Medium 3.5 and OCR 4 models to its Foundry platform, with Medium 3.5 landing in Copilot Studio, as Cryptopolitan has reported.

Mistral has been widening its footprint beyond text and code. It also holds a framework agreement with the French military to run AI on French-controlled infrastructure, as the EU pushes to cut its reliance on non-European cloud providers.

Still a smaller player than its US rivals

Even at €20 billion, Mistral sits well below the US labs it is chasing. Anthropic recently closed $65 billion in Series H funding at a $965 billion post-money valuation, a month after OpenAI raised $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation.

Mistral is racing not only those two but also fast-growing Chinese model makers as well.

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