Samsung in talks to invest about €1B in French AI start-up Mistral

Samsung (SSNLF) is reportedly in discussions to invest around €1B in Mistral, the French AI company, as part of a new funding round that could value the firm at approximately €20B ($22.81B), as per the Financial Times.

Sweden's EQT, through its Scaleup Europe Fund, is also said to be in talks to participate in the round.

Mistral AI’s last major equity funding was a €1.7B Series C round announced in September 2025. The round was led by Dutch semiconductor giant ASML Holding NV (ASML) and valued the Paris-based company at €11.7B. Following that equity round, the company also secured an $830M debt financing round in March 2026 to fund its data center infrastructure buildout in France and Sweden.

This comes after Microsoft (MSFT) has agreed to invest billions of dollars in Mistral's European AI infrastructure, while expanding distribution of the French startup's technology. Under the deal, Azure customers will be able to build AI applications using Mistral's France-based data centers, increasing Microsoft's European capacity and offering regulated industries an alternative to U.S.-based infrastructure.

Mistral AI is a fast-growing French artificial intelligence company, founded in Paris in 2023 by former researchers from Google DeepMind and Meta, that develops high-performance, efficient large language models (LLMs) and AI development platforms.