South Korea's Samsung is in negotiations to invest approximately €1 billion in Mistral, the Paris-based artificial intelligence startup, as part of a fundraising round that could value the company at around €20 billion ($22.81 billion), according to a Financial Times report citing sources familiar with the matter. Swedish investment firm EQT's Scaleup Europe Fund is also said to be in talks to participate in the round. Neither Samsung nor Mistral has publicly confirmed the discussions.
The reported Samsung talks follow a separate agreement announced on Tuesday in which Microsoft committed to spending billions of dollars on Mistral's computing infrastructure in Europe. Under that deal, Microsoft Azure customers will be able to develop software using Mistral's data centres in France, offering regulated industries an alternative to US-controlled infrastructure. Mistral has also integrated its AI models — Medium 3.5 and OCR 4 — into Microsoft's app-building platform Foundry, while businesses using Azure Local will gain access to Mistral's open models. Microsoft President Brad Smith said the partnership would combine "American and European technology" in a way that provides "continuous and assured access," without involving any new equity stake in the startup.
Founded in 2023, Mistral has rapidly established itself as one of Europe's leading AI companies, winning contracts with France's armed forces and targeting sectors including manufacturing, financial services, and defence. The company aims to reach one gigawatt of computing capacity by 2030. Despite its rapid rise, its valuation remains well below that of US counterparts such as Anthropic, which is itself reportedly in talks for a multibillion-dollar infrastructure deal with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
The flurry of investment activity around Mistral reflects a broader push in Europe and beyond to reduce dependence on US technology. That drive has gained fresh urgency after the United States last month paused foreign access to two advanced AI models from Anthropic, prompting renewed concern among European governments about their exposure to American-controlled digital infrastructure. Mistral has explicitly positioned itself as a sovereign European alternative, though full decoupling from US technology remains a distant prospect — the Nvidia chips central to Mistral's data-centre expansion are themselves American-designed, and both Nvidia and Microsoft are existing investors in the company.
A Bloomberg News report has suggested Mistral is seeking to raise around €3 billion in its current funding round. Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch declined to comment on those figures, but the combination of the Microsoft infrastructure deal and the reported Samsung interest signals growing confidence among major global players in Europe's ability to compete in the AI race.