The Financial Times broke the news that Samsung wants in on Mistral’s upcoming €3 billion funding round. While the original report politely estimates the South Korean contribution at “hundreds of millions of euros,” the industry grapevine quickly rounded that up to a cool €1 billion. Of course, both companies declined to comment to Reuters. That is just standard corporate poker face.

Hardware meets software

The logic behind the deal makes total sense. Samsung already rakes in cash by supplying the high-bandwidth memory needed to train AI models. Grabbing a stake in a frontier software lab simply secures their grip on the entire ecosystem.

For Mistral, the appeal is even more obvious. CEO Arthur Mensch wants to design custom chips to finally break free from Nvidia’s market chokehold. When you are trying to build your own silicon, having a global memory titan on your cap table definitely helps. They also just raised an €830 million debt facility to fund their own data centers in Paris and Sweden.

Buying an expensive insurance policy

Let’s be honest: Mistral’s models still lag slightly behind American heavyweights like OpenAI and Anthropic. So why the €20 billion price tag? Europe is absolutely desperate for a homegrown tech champion. With US export controls tightening, throwing money at Mistral is basically Europe buying a sovereign insurance policy.

The strategy is working. They already landed enterprise clients like Airbus and BMW. On top of that, Dutch chip equipment maker ASML previously dropped a massive €1.3 billion to become their largest shareholder, and EQT’s Scaleup Europe fund is reportedly joining this new funding round too.

If this deal closes, Mistral’s total funding hits roughly €6.5 billion. More importantly, a Samsung signature means Mistral is no longer just a European pet project – it officially becomes a global contender.

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