Samsung Leads €3 Billion Funding Round for Mistral AI, Valuation Hits €21 Billion

Mistral AI has announced the close of a €3 billion Series D funding round led by Samsung Electronics. The French company's new valuation exceeds €21 billion, nearly double what it was a year earlier, and the company is calling it the largest equity deal in the history of a European technology company.

Who joined the round

Samsung Electronics became the lead investor, itself a new addition to Mistral's investor base. Co-leading the round were the EU's Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, and existing investor PSG Equity. Microsoft and Nvidia also joined, with Nvidia increasing its existing equity stake in the company.

A year earlier, Mistral closed a €1.7 billion Series C round led by Dutch chip-equipment maker ASML, at an €11.7 billion valuation. The latest round thus represents an almost twofold increase in valuation within twelve months, even though the company still trails far behind OpenAI and Anthropic in market value.

Where the money will go

Mistral CEO and co-founder Arthur Mensch said the funds will go primarily toward research on next-generation models and the expansion of the company's own computing infrastructure. Mistral is already investing €4 billion in data centers across Europe, including a facility operating near Paris and another under construction in Sweden, partly financed by Microsoft.

Long term, the plan is to fully rely on capacity that we are building ourselves, and so that means that the amount of compute that we own is going to grow around 100% in the next five years - Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral AI

Mensch also said the new computing resources will be used to train larger and faster models, with Mistral renting out surplus capacity to other parties while building its own technological independence from external cloud providers.

Samsung and the hardware angle

Samsung's involvement opens a new front of cooperation. The Korean conglomerate had signaled interest in taking a stake in Mistral for months, fitting a strategy of linking its own memory chip production with AI model development. Mensch suggested the partnership with Samsung could resemble the production integration model Mistral already has with ASML, weaving the French company's technology into its partner's devices and infrastructure.

The European context

For three years, Mistral has positioned itself as a European alternative to the American AI giants, championing the continent's technological sovereignty. Despite the rising valuation, AI adoption in Europe remains at around 13.5 percent, well below the United States, showing that investment capital is currently outpacing actual deployment among businesses.

For Polish companies and institutions following the European AI market, Mistral's round signals that capital for developing local alternatives to American models is still flowing, with investors such as the EU's Scaleup Europe Fund treating it as part of building the continent's technological independence. Mistral's clients already include European corporations such as Airbus, ASML and HSBC.

The new funds are also meant to allow Mistral to expand internationally beyond the 20 countries where it currently operates. The company has not disclosed a detailed spending timeline or launch dates for further data centers beyond the facility in Sweden already mentioned.