Samsung invests up to €1B in Mistral at a €20B valuation

Samsung is in talks to invest up to €1 billion into Mistral, a French AI company — a deal that, if it closes, would value Mistral at around €20 billion, up from €12 billion less than a year ago. A Swedish fund, EQT, is also part of the talks. Samsung already put money into Mistral back in 2024 through its venture fund.

At the same time, Samsung is separately discussing with Anthropic a deal to make a custom AI chip. And Mistral itself is growing fast: analysts expect its revenue to pass $1 billion a year by the end of 2026, after it signed a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure deal with Microsoft and started rolling out thousands of Nvidia Vera Rubin chips in Azure for "sovereign AI" — AI infrastructure a country controls and runs on its own soil instead of renting from a foreign cloud.

None of this is signed yet, but I read it as a sign of where the money is pointing: Mistral is turning into Europe's one AI company that both a chip giant and a cloud giant want a piece of. For me, that's the real story here — not a done deal, but serious players betting real money that "sovereign AI" can be a profitable business, not just a political talking point.