Samsung is reportedly in talks to invest up to one billion euros in French artificial intelligence startup Mistral, according to the Financial Times. The investment would push Mistral's valuation to approximately 20 billion euros, a significant jump from the 12 billion euro valuation the company held less than a year ago.
Samsung already has a foothold in Mistral through its venture capital arm, which invested in the startup in 2024. Swedish investment firm EQT is also said to be participating in the new funding round, according to the report.
Samsung's Expanding AI Footprint
The potential investment is part of Samsung's broader strategy to deepen its presence in the AI industry. The South Korean electronics giant is one of the world's largest manufacturers of memory chips, a critical component for AI computing. Samsung is also in discussions with Anthropic, another AI company, about producing a custom AI chip.
Mistral's Rapid Growth
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Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said in a February interview that he expects the company's annual revenue to exceed one billion dollars by the end of the year. The startup has been scaling up its operations aggressively.
Just this week, Mistral expanded its partnership with Microsoft. The US technology company has committed billions of dollars in spending on Mistral's compute infrastructure. Mistral is increasing its GPU capacity with thousands of Nvidia Vera Rubin chips and is making its models available through Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. This includes deployment in air-gapped environments without internet access, which is important for regulated industries such as finance and healthcare.
Background on Mistral
Mistral is a French AI startup founded in 2023 by former researchers from Google DeepMind and Meta. The company has quickly become one of Europe's most prominent AI companies, known for its open-source language models and focus on efficient AI architectures. Its rapid valuation growth reflects the intense investor interest in AI startups that can compete with larger US-based companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.