Samsung reportedly in talks to back Mistral at €20bn valuation

Samsung is reportedly weighing a bet on Europe’s best-funded AI startup. The South Korean conglomerate is in talks to invest in Mistral as part of a fundraising round that could value the Paris company at roughly €20bn, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the discussions.

The size of Samsung’s cheque is where the reporting turns slippery. The FT put it at “hundreds of millions of euros,” while several summaries of the story have rounded that up to about €1bn.

What is more firmly established is the shape of the round itself: Mistral is raising around €3bn, nearly doubling the €11.7bn valuation it commanded less than a year ago. A multibillion-dollar Microsoft deal to carry its models on Azure sits in the same recent stretch.

Neither Samsung nor Mistral has confirmed the talks, and both declined to comment when contacted by Reuters, which relayed the FT’s account. That is the standard caveat for a story of this kind, and worth keeping in view.

Early-stage funding discussions collapse, get repriced, or quietly change their cast of investors all the time, and the FT itself noted that both the amount and the valuation remain subject to change.

Mistral has spent the past year assembling exactly the sort of backer list a sovereignty pitch requires. Its September Series C raised €1.7bn at an €11.7bn valuation, a round in which the Dutch chip-equipment maker ASML wrote a €1.3bn cheque to become the company’s largest shareholder.

EQT’s Scaleup Europe fund has also been named among the parties circling the new round, according to the reporting, though the full investor line-up has not been disclosed. Should it close on the reported terms, Mistral’s total funding would climb to somewhere around €6.5bn in equity and debt combined.

For Samsung, the logic is less about European flag-waving than about supply and demand. The group’s memory business is one of the primary beneficiaries of the AI build-out, and its $1tn market-cap milestone earlier this year was driven largely by appetite for the high-bandwidth memory that trains and runs models like Mistral’s.

A stake in a frontier lab would give it a foothold on the software side of a market it already supplies at the hardware level.

For Mistral, the pull of a strategic investor with a chip business of its own is not hard to read. Chief executive Arthur Mensch has spoken about designing custom silicon to loosen the company’s dependence on Nvidia, and a memory giant is a useful name to have on the register while doing so.

The startup has also been building out its own compute, raising an €830m debt facility earlier this year to fund data centres in Paris and Sweden, and counts Airbus and BMW among its enterprise customers.

The wider backdrop is a European AI sector that keeps clearing valuation bars faster than it clears product ones. Mistral’s models still trail those of OpenAI and Anthropic, both valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and the €20bn figure rests more on Europe’s hunger for a home-grown champion than on any parity of performance.

That hunger has hardened as US export controls and platform restrictions have made a domestic alternative look less like a luxury and more like insurance, and governments across the bloc have begun steering procurement toward homegrown suppliers.

For now, the story is a report, not a deal. If Samsung does sign, it would be one of the more consequential names yet to join Mistral’s cap table, and a sign that the chase for the company is no longer a mainly European affair.

If it does not, the round is unlikely to want for interest at €20bn, given the queue of strategic and sovereign backers already forming. Either way, the terms on the table today may not be the terms that close.