The market value of Europe’s largest artificial intelligence developer has risen to 21 billion euros, attracting 3 billion euros of investment

French Mistral Artificial Intelligence attracted A group of investors led by Samsung is expected to invest 3 billion euros, with more than 21 billion euros expected – funds that will be used to develop artificial intelligence models and create computing infrastructure.

Image source: mistral.ai

The company’s last round of financing took place a year ago, when it was valued at 11.7 billion euros. The proceeds will give Mistral the opportunity to make progress in the field of industrial artificial intelligence, which includes the introduction of production process technology and is becoming one of the company’s key differentiators. The scale of Mistral’s activities is more modest compared to global industry leaders such as OpenAI and Anthropic, but the company is positioning itself as Europe’s sovereign alternative. Agreements have been signed with the likes of Airbus, BMW and ASML – which led Mistral’s last funding round.

“This fundraise also provides us with the opportunity to expand further in the U.S., Asia, and of course double down on what we’re doing in Europe. This technology requires a lot of infrastructure.”said company CEO Arthur Mensch. To do this, companies need to have “significant assets”including the data center. Mistral raised $830 million in debt this year to build a facility near Paris using Nvidia equipment. She allocated a further €1.2 billion to build a data center in Sweden – for her, the first such facility outside France.

Last year, ASML acquired an 11% stake in Mistral and participated in a new round of financing. Agreement with Samsung “Opens the door for further cooperation”“, Mr. Mensch pointed out. Mistral was founded in 2023 by Arthur Mensch, who came from Google DeepMind and former Meta employees✴ Timothy Lacroix and Guillaume Lamper. The company develops open large language models; it relies on support from European governments as an alternative to U.S. and Chinese solutions.