Samsung in Talks to Invest Up to €1 Billion in Mistral, Financial Times Reports
Key Takeaways
- •Samsung is negotiating an investment of up to €1 billion in Mistral, which would raise the French AI startup's valuation to roughly €20 billion.
- •Mistral was valued at €12 billion less than a year ago and was founded in 2023 by former researchers from Google DeepMind and Meta.
- •A potential deal would deepen Samsung's footprint across the AI stack, complementing its semiconductor business and ongoing talks with Anthropic on custom AI chips.
- •Mistral recently expanded its partnership with Microsoft, with the U.S. company committing billions of dollars to Mistral's compute infrastructure.
- •Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch expects the company's annual revenue to surpass $1 billion by the end of the year.
Samsung is in discussions to invest as much as €1 billion in French AI startup Mistral, a deal that would lift the company's valuation to about €20 billion, according to the Financial Times.
Mistral, founded in 2023 by researchers from Google's DeepMind and Meta, has emerged as one of Europe's most prominent AI startups, developing open-weight large language models that compete with offerings from U.S.-based companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. The reported talks come less than a year after Mistral was valued at €12 billion. Samsung previously invested in Mistral through its venture arm in 2024. Swedish investment firm EQT is also reportedly taking part in the new funding round.
Samsung has continued to expand its presence across the AI sector. The company is one of the world's largest memory chip manufacturers and is also in talks with Anthropic about producing a custom AI chip. A potential Mistral investment would deepen Samsung's foothold across multiple layers of the AI stack, from semiconductor manufacturing to model development, reflecting a broader industry pattern of hardware companies forging closer ties with AI software firms.
Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said in a February interview that he expected the company's annual revenue to exceed $1 billion by the end of the year. This week, Mistral also expanded its partnership with Microsoft, with the U.S. company committing to spend billions of dollars on Mistral's compute infrastructure.
As part of that expansion, Mistral is increasing its GPU capacity with thousands of Nvidia Vera Rubin chips. The company is also making its models available through Microsoft's Azure cloud, including in air-gapped environments without internet access for regulated industries such as finance and healthcare.
