Reuters quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that ASML, a Dutch semiconductor equipment manufacturer, is expected to become the largest shareholder of Mistral AI, a new French AI company, to strengthen its European technology ownership....
Reuters quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that ASML, a Dutch semiconductor equipment manufacturer, is expected to become the largest shareholder of Mistral AI, a new French AI company, to strengthen its European technology ownership.
People familiar with the matter pointed out that ASML will invest 1.3 billion euros, accounting for most of Mistral AI's new round of financing of 1.7 billion euros, and further gain a board seat.
This makes Mistral AI a pre-investment valuation of 1 billion euros, becoming the most valuable AI company in Europe. The alliance between ASML and Mistral AI will help Europe reduce its dependence on the US and Chinese models.
People familiar with the matter revealed that Bank of America has provided consultation services on ASML's investment in Mistral AI. ASML, Mistral AI and the US Bank do not want to publish any comments.
ASML exclusively supplies EUV microfilm equipment to wafer foundry manufacturers such as Telco and Intel, with a single system costing about US$180 million, playing a key role in advanced chip manufacturing. At the same time, ASML applies AI extensively in equipment to improve equipment efficiency. In the future, data analysis and AI capabilities introduced into Mistral AI will be able to further improve product performance and give birth to new products.
Mistral AI registered and established a company in May 2023. The founding team has participated in the development of large-scale language models. Co-founder and executive director Arthur Mensch was a researcher at Google DeepMind and is the core contributor of the Flamingo and Chinchilla models. Two other co-founders, Timothée Lacroix (Mistral AI Technologies) and Guillaume Lample (Mistral AI chief scientist) were former researchers in the Meta Paris AI Experimental Office. They have conducted in-depth research on model reasoning, pre-training and model embedding. They have published many important papers and are the core contributors of Llama and Llama 2.
Mistral AI has completed its B-Round financing in 2024, and the company's valuation exceeds US$6 billion, while NVIDIA and Microsoft 2 major technology giants have become investors and partners of Mistral AI. According to the Financial Times report earlier this month, Mistral AI is inquiring with investors such as MGX to invest $1 billion in valuation of $1 billion. Bloomberg also pointed out that the valuation of the new round of financing target is set at $14 billion.
Note: Mistral AI announced on the 9th that it completed a C-wheel financing of 1.7 billion euros, led by ASML, and its valuation after investment was 1.17 billion euros. (2025/09/09 PM 04:50)
Exclusive: ASML becomes Mistral AI’s top shareholder after leading latest foundation round, sources say Extended reading: Mistral AI will be valued at 6 billion euros, becoming the new European technology leader
