"Samsung Leads 4.7 Trillion Won Investment in French AI Firm Mistral… to Develop AI Specialized for Semiconductors"

This was the most in-depth article on the chip venture that we saw. We'll go to Bloomberg for the large-by-large financing.

From Korea's Edaily, September 9:

• Strategic Partnership Signed Suddenly to Coincide with South Korea-France Summit
• DS Data and Mistral Raji Join Forces… to Build Enhanced Security
• "Setting a New Standard for Semiconductor Innovation… Contributing to the Global Value System"

Samsung Electronics Chairman Jay Y. Lee and Arthur Ménch, CEO of Mistral AI, pose for 

a commemorative photo on the 8th (local time) at the Élysée Palace in Paris, France, after 

exchanging an investment agreement in the presence of President Lee Jae-myung and French 

President Emmanuel Macron. From left: Samsung Electronics Executive Vice President Lee 

Jong-myung, Samsung Electronics Chairman Jay Y. Lee, President Lee, President Macron, 

and Arthur Ménch, CEO of Mistral AI. (Photo: Yonhap News)

[Edaily Reporter Han Kwangbeom ] SamsungElectronics(005930)Samsung Electronics has led a 3 billion euro (approximately 4.7 trillion won) Series D funding round for the French artificial intelligence (AI) company Mistral AI and signed a long-term technology partnership. Through this, the company has significantly expanded its influence in the global AI ecosystem.

SamsungElectronics announced on the 9th that it has entered into a strategic partnership with Mistral AI and agreed to jointly develop “semiconductor-specific AI” that combines the technology and manufacturing data from its DS (Semiconductor) Division with Mistral AI’s high-efficiency AI model technology to enhance productivity and precision across the entire semiconductor operations. SamsungElectronics plans to use this partnership as an opportunity to accelerate the AI transformation across all business divisions, including semiconductors, and strengthen its competitiveness in the global AI semiconductor market.

The signing of this partnership was timed to coincide with the South Korea-France summit. Previously, Mistral AI had officially announced a 3 billion euro investment round led by SamsungElectronics, with EQT’s Scale-Up Europe Fund and PSG Equity serving as co-leads. New investors in this round included BlackRock, Advent, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, while major existing shareholders—such as NVIDIA, ASML, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and Salesforce Ventures—also participated in significant reinvestments.

SamsungElectronics’ investment marks the largest equity investment in the history of European tech companies, and Mistral AI has achieved a valuation of over 21 billion euros (approximately 33 trillion won) just three years after its founding. Mistral AI stated, “This investment is a significant milestone achieved under SamsungElectronics’ leadership,” adding, “The funds raised will be used to strengthen our infrastructure and product capabilities and accelerate large-scale deployment; above all, they will serve as a driving force to continue and expand our frontier research and AI model development.”

◇Mistral: Europe’s Leader in “Sovereign AI”… Unparalleled Influence in Technological Sovereignty and the Ecosystem

Mistral AI, a leading player in the European AI ecosystem, was founded by AI researchers from Google DeepMind and Meta, led by CEO Arthur Mensch. Mistral AI possesses unparalleled technical capabilities to build customized AI models in on-premises environments for industries requiring a high level of data security, such as finance, manufacturing, and energy....

....MUCH MORE 

And from Bloomberg, September 7: 

Mistral AI Boosts Valuation to €21 Billion in Samsung-Led Round 

Mistral AI has raised €3 billion ($3.5 billion) at a valuation of more than €21 billion from investors led by Samsung Electronics Co. to fund the development of artificial intelligence models and build computing infrastructure.

The EU’s Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity co-led the round, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. The Paris-based startup has nearly doubled its €11.7 billion valuation from its last fundraising round a year ago.

The funding will give Mistral the ammunition to advance in industrial AI, which involves rolling out the tech for manufacturing processes and is emerging as one of the company’s key differentiators, Chief Executive Officer Arthur Mensch said in an interview. While Mistral is a fraction of the size of generative AI behemoths such as OpenAI and Anthropic PBC, the company has been selling itself as a sovereign alternative for Europe. It’s struck deals with large European industrial companies including Airbus SE, BMW AG and Dutch chip-machine maker ASML Holding NV, which led Mistral’s previous round.

“This fundraising is also a way for us to further expand in the US, in Asia and of course to double down on what we’ve been doing in Europe,” Mensch said. “This is a technology that requires significant infrastructure.”

That involves owning “significant assets” such as data centers, he added. Earlier this year, Mistral raised $830 million in debt for a data center project outside Paris that would use Nvidia Corp. chips. The company committed a further €1.2 billion to a data center buildout in Sweden, its first data center investment outside France.

Similar to the ASML partnership, the agreement with Samsung “opens the door for further collaboration,” Mensch said. ASML, which participated in this most recent funding round, invested €1.3 billion for an 11% stake last year. ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet said at the time he planned to “flood the entire organization” with AI.

Mistral was founded in 2023 by Mensch, an alumnus of Google’s DeepMind, and ex-Meta Platforms Inc. researchers Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample. It develops open-source large language models, in contrast to the “closed” models developed by its larger American counterparts. Mensch has touted open source as more cost efficient and easier to integrate into large, complex corporate systems.

Mensch is counting on gaining traction with European governments, fearful of relying too heavily on artificial intelligence products owned by American and Chinese companies. US President Donald Trump’s administration compounded these fears this summer, when it ordered Anthropic to disable access to its most advanced AI models for all foreign nationals, citing national security concerns....

....MUCH MORE

Most recently on Mistral: 

July 21 - "Microsoft Deepens Ties With Mistral, Targeting Europe and Enterprise AI"
When your company (Mistral) is not just the national standard-bearer but the flagship for the whole continent it's amazing how many companies come knocking on your door.... 

***

....It's also another sign of how MSFT is distancing itself from OpenAI. Another couple years and Mr. Nadella will be saying "Sam who?" 

If interested, quite a few of our Mistral links are in July 17's "Airbus migrating 70 critical apps from AWS to France's Scaleway amid digital sovereignty push".

And a couple I forgot to include:

"Why Paris may be the most important AI city outside Silicon Valley"
Though this is an infomercial for one of TechCrunch's products it also happens to be true, though Shenzhen could probably make a claim to that moniker as well....

FrenchTech: "Mistral launches Industrial Engineering AI with Airbus, BMW and EDF as headline customers" (plus rebutting the Pope)

And a couple more from the hazy depths of time gone by (2024):

FrenchTech: "Mistral AI, Europe’s OpenAI rival, adds top LLM to Amazon Bedrock"

FrenchTech: Mistral AI Is Cutting Deals Right and Left
Some adroit, some gauche....

I am so sorry. 

July 22 - "Samsung is in talks to take an equity stake in Mistral AI as the French startup seeks €3 billion at a €20 billion valuation"

And many, many more, going back to:

June 2023 - French Tech: "Mistral AI secures €105M in Europe’s largest-ever seed round"

Although we've been pitching French startups as a potential engine of growth to supplant German dominance, and although we've made Artificial Intelligence one of the foci of the blog since 2013 - "Why Is Machine Learning (CS 229) The Most Popular Course At Stanford" - and although we began juxtaposing the two strands five years ago, I'm still impressed with this sort of money going into a company that was formed in the last five weeks....

FrenchTech: "Mistral AI's Bold Journey"

A couple indications of just how fast Mistral is coming along.

From Turing Point, January 5, 2024:

Mistral AI's Bold Journey
From Paris to Global Stage: The Unconventional Rise of a French AI Unicorn and Its Open-Source Revolution

This French startup, founded in April 2023 with the ambitious goal of challenging the European Union's technological supremacy, has earned both admiration and skepticism. What sets Mistral AI apart is its focus on open-source technology and its bold approach, unapologetically offering models devoid of safety controls. According to a list of 178 questions and answers composed by AI safety researcher Paul Röttger and 404 Media’s testing, Mistral AI’s models have been churning out some rather dicey advice. The content generated by Mistral AI's models has ignited debates on morality, spanning topics from ethnic cleansing to retrograde discrimination, even venturing into unsettling DIY territory.

In December 2023, only 7 months after their launch, Mistral AI ripped all the charts, becoming a GenAI unicorn with a valuation exceeding $2 billion. They also unconventionally launched an open-sourced model, Mixtral 8x7B, based on the sparse mixture-of-experts technique, via a torrent link! Who are these bold French innovators, what drives them, why the Mixtral model is so efficient, who supports them, and why? Let’s find out.

• Starting point of Mistral AI
• The founders' (or France's?) vision
• Founder’s views toward AI risks
• Financial situation
• It took them four months to roll out their first LLM
• Next step: Mixtral – understanding SMoE architecture and what makes that model so efficient
• How does Mistral make money?
• Conclusion

The founders' (or France's?) vision
Recently, prominent French AI leaders such as Yann LeCun of Meta and Clément Delangue of Hugging Face have been actively promoting French tech achievements on Twitter. This effort culminated in a partnership between Meta, Hugging Face, and Scaleway at Paris's Station F, signaling a shift in the global tech landscape. France, with its academic excellence and government support, aims to emerge as a potential open-source AI capital....

....MORE

And from InfoQ, Jan 23, 2024:

Mistral AI's Open-Source Mixtral 8x7B Outperforms GPT-3.5

Mistral AI recently released Mixtral 8x7B, a sparse mixture of experts (SMoE) large language model (LLM). The model contains 46.7B total parameters, but performs inference at the same speed and cost as models one-third that size. On several LLM benchmarks, it outperformed both Llama 2 70B and GPT-3.5, the model powering ChatGPT.

Mistral 8x7B has a context length of 32k tokens and can accept the Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English language. Besides the base Mixtral 8x7B model, Mistral AI also released a model called Mixtral 8x7B Instruct, which is fine-tuned for instruction-following using direct preference optimisation (DPO). Both models' weights are released under the Apache 2.0 license. Mistral AI also added support for the model to the vLLM open-source project. According to Mistral AI:

Mistral AI continues its mission to deliver the best open models to the developer community. Moving forward in AI requires taking new technological turns beyond reusing well-known architectures and training paradigms. Most importantly, it requires making the community benefit from original models to foster new inventions and usages.

Mixture of Experts (MoE) models are often used in LLMs as a way to increase model size while keeping training and inference time low. The idea dates back to 1991, and Google applied it to Transformer-based LLMs in 2021. In 2022, InfoQ covered Google's Image-Text MoE model LIMoE, which outperformed CLIP. Later that year, InfoQ also covered Meta's NLB-200 MoE translation model, which can translate between any of over 200 languages....

....MUCH MORE

As we said in the outro from February 18's "Venture Capital: "These 12 startups could be France’s next unicorns":

We'll have more on Mistral next week. Previously:
French Tech: "Mistral AI secures €105M in Europe’s largest-ever seed round"

Although we've been pitching French startups as a potential engine of growth to supplant German dominance, and although we've made Artificial Intelligence one of the foci of the blog since 2013 - "Why Is Machine Learning (CS 229) The Most Popular Course At Stanford" - and although we began juxtaposing the two strands five years ago, I'm still impressed with this sort of money going into a company that was formed in the last five weeks.

"...Big Tech Alumni building AI startups in Paris"

"France's unicorn start-up Mistral AI embodies its artificial intelligence hopes"

French OpenAI Rival Mistral Nears $2 Billion Valuation With Andreessen Horowitz Backing
This. This is what we've been pitching for the last five years as the way France picks up the economic torch from Germany....

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says AI to See ‘Major Second Wave (NVDA)

AI to See ‘Major Second Wave,’ NVIDIA CEO Says in Fireside Chat With iliad Group Exec
NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang says sovereign AI a growing need for countries to reflect unique cultural, linguistic, industrial characteristics

European startups will get a massive boost from a new generation of AI infrastructure, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said Friday in a fireside chat with iliad Group Deputy CEO Aude Durand — and it’s coming just in time....

France's "Mistral AI warns of lack of data centres and training capacity in Europe"

June 13's Bloomberg story French Tech: "Mistral Fundraises at €5.8 Billion Valuation to Rival OpenAI" continued after the jump:

...France has become a European hotspot for AI development, tapping investor interest and local talent from tech companies such as Google’s DeepMind, who have gone on to found their own startups....

It looks as if Mistral is feeling confident enough about its leadership position to begin making policy demands. And akin to the sovereign AI pitch of one of their investors, Nvidia, Mistral has developed their large language models in different languages, meaning they want data centers in different countries.

From EuroNews, June 14:

French start-up also concerned about lack of diversity in language training models.

Europe lacks the data centres to train artificial intelligence models that match the current demand, an official from French AI company Mistral AI warned on Friday.

“We are reaching the capacity; we need to build datacentres and ensure there is enough electricity for the scale of AI development today. There is a huge amount of work to be done,” Audrey Herblin-Stoop, Head of Public Affairs at Mistral AI said at a conference organised by the European Court of Auditors (ECA).

Mistral AI, which was founded a year ago, used supercomputer facilities opened by the European Commission to train its models. 

"The access to infrastructure is important, if you don't have this, you cannot build large language models. We could train the first ones on [EU supercomputer] Leonardo. We were lucky enough not being blocked access to computing, but this will come for other companies. The volumes that are needed for AI are incredible," she added.

The company announced a new large language model set to rival OpenAI's ChatGPT, last February.

The model, called Mistral Large, is fluent in French, English, German, Spanish and Italian. However, its strategic partnership with Microsoft, that is looking to invest €15 million in Mistral AI, faces scrutiny by the European Commission....

....MUCH MORE

Related: 

• FrenchTech: "Mistral AI, Europe’s OpenAI rival, adds top LLM to Amazon Bedrock"
• Viking AI: "Silo AI launches Nordic LLM family to protect Europe’s linguistic diversity"
• FrenchTech: Mistral AI Is Cutting Deals Right and Left
• FrenchTech: "Critics question Microsoft's deal with Mistral AI, as EU set to look into it"
• FrenchTech: "Mistral AI's Bold Journey"

...As we said in the outro from February 18's "Venture Capital: "These 12 startups could be France’s next unicorns":

We'll have more on Mistral next week. Previously:
French Tech: "Mistral AI secures €105M in Europe’s largest-ever seed round"

Although we've been pitching French startups as a potential engine of growth to supplant German dominance, and although we've made Artificial Intelligence one of the foci of the blog since 2013 - "Why Is Machine Learning (CS 229) The Most Popular Course At Stanford" - and although we began juxtaposing the two strands five years ago, I'm still impressed with this sort of money going into a company that was formed in the last five weeks.

"...Big Tech Alumni building AI startups in Paris"

"France's unicorn start-up Mistral AI embodies its artificial intelligence hopes"

French OpenAI Rival Mistral Nears $2 Billion Valuation With Andreessen Horowitz Backing
This. This is what we've been pitching for the last five years as the way France picks up the economic torch from Germany....

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says AI to See ‘Major Second Wave (NVDA)

AI to See ‘Major Second Wave,’ NVIDIA CEO Says in Fireside Chat With iliad Group Exec
NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang says sovereign AI a growing need for countries to reflect unique cultural, linguistic, industrial characteristics

European startups will get a massive boost from a new generation of AI infrastructure, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said Friday in a fireside chat with iliad Group Deputy CEO Aude Durand — and it’s coming just in time....

"Mistral, the French AI giant, is reportedly on the cusp of securing a $14 billion valuation"

Lifted in toto from TechCrunch via Yahoo Finance, September 3:

French AI startup Mistral AI is finalizing a €2 billion investment at a post-money valuation of $14 billion, reports Bloomberg, positioning the company as one of Europe’s most valuable tech startups. The two-year-old OpenAI rival, founded by former DeepMind and Meta researchers, develops open source language models and Le Chat, its AI chatbot built for European audiences.

Mistral isn’t commenting on the report, but the round would represent Mistral’s first major raise since June 2024, when it was valued at €5.8 billion. The company has previously raised over €1 billion from prominent investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst.

The investment comes as European AI startups gain unprecedented momentum. European AI companies secured 55% more year-on-year investment in Q1 2025, according to Dealroom, with 12 European startups achieving unicorn status in the first half of the year. Also leading this surge is Sweden’s Lovable, an AI coding platform that reached a $1.8 billion valuation in July just eight months after its launch.

The grow up so fast. 
Previously:

June 2023 - French Tech: "Mistral AI secures €105M in Europe’s largest-ever seed round"

Although we've been pitching French startups as a potential engine of growth to supplant German dominance, and although we've made Artificial Intelligence one of the foci of the blog since 2013 - "Why Is Machine Learning (CS 229) The Most Popular Course At Stanford" - and although we began juxtaposing the two strands five years ago, I'm still impressed with this sort of money going into a company that was formed in the last five weeks.

"...Big Tech Alumni building AI startups in Paris"

"France's unicorn start-up Mistral AI embodies its artificial intelligence hopes"

French OpenAI Rival Mistral Nears $2 Billion Valuation With Andreessen Horowitz Backing
This. This is what we've been pitching for the last five years as the way France picks up the economic torch from Germany....

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says AI to See ‘Major Second Wave (NVDA)

AI to See ‘Major Second Wave,’ NVIDIA CEO Says in Fireside Chat With iliad Group Exec
NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang says sovereign AI a growing need for countries to reflect unique cultural, linguistic, industrial characteristics

European startups will get a massive boost from a new generation of AI infrastructure, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said Friday in a fireside chat with iliad Group Deputy CEO Aude Durand — and it’s coming just in time....

February 2024 - FrenchTech: "Mistral AI's Bold Journey"
A couple indications of just how fast Mistral is coming along.

March 2024 - FrenchTech: Mistral AI Is Cutting Deals Right and Left

Some adroit, some gauche.We've already looked at the end-of-February Microsoft hook-up "FrenchTech: "Critics question Microsoft's deal with Mistral AI, as EU set to look into it".

June 2024 - France's "Mistral AI warns of lack of data centres and training capacity in Europe"

June 13's Bloomberg story French Tech: "Mistral Fundraises at €5.8 Billion Valuation to Rival OpenAI" continued after the jump:

...France has become a European hotspot for AI development, tapping investor interest and local talent from tech companies such as Google’s DeepMind, who have gone on to found their own startups....

It looks as if Mistral is feeling confident enough about its leadership position to begin making policy demands. And akin to the sovereign AI pitch of one of their investors, Nvidia, Mistral has developed their large language models in different languages, meaning they want data centers in different countries.

May 2025 - French Tech: France To Host Europe's Largest Data Center (UAE's MGX; EDF; NVDA; Bpifrance; Mistral AI) 

June 2025 - French Tech: French Supermajor "TotalEnergies to Collaborate with Mistral AI to Increase the Application of Artificial Intelligence in its Multi-Energy Strategy" 

And many, many more. Use the 'search blog' box, upper left, if interested. 

"Microsoft Deepens Ties With Mistral, Targeting Europe and Enterprise AI"

When your company (Mistral) is not just the national standard-bearer but the flagship for the whole continent it's amazing how many companies come knocking on your door.

From the Wall Street Journal, July 21: 

Microsoft and Mistral AI expanded their artificial intelligence partnership on Tuesday, with a multibillion-dollar commitment from Microsoft to help the French AI company build data centers in Europe.

The deal is the latest attempt by both companies to reach a greater number of European and enterprise AI clients, as the two go up against rival AI labs and other U.S. tech giants.

“Distribution is king,” said Mistral Chief Executive and Co-founder Arthur Mensch, adding that Microsoft’s heft would facilitate the AI company’s expansion with businesses in Europe and across the world.

Mistral has touted the importance of Europe’s independence from U.S. technology companies. At the same time, it has been ramping up its push for enterprise clients—an area where U.S. behemoth Microsoft offers immense reach.

For Microsoft, working with Mistral is part of the European digital commitments it made last year, in which it pledged to increase data-center capacity in the European Union. Its latest move comes as the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, is considering classifying Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform as a gatekeeper under the bloc’s Digital Markets Act—a designation that requires companies to take extra steps to ensure they aren’t stifling competition.

“Our partnership with Mistral is becoming a core pillar of our broader European efforts,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, said in an interview. “This is a moment when European customers are especially focused on resilient supply of AI.”

The partnership includes a “multibillion-dollar” agreement from Microsoft—which it declined to specify—to support Mistral’s data center build-out in Europe. As the company builds a “GPU fleet” in Europe, some of those AI chips will be used by Microsoft to serve its customers, said Mensch, referring to the data centers that house graphics processing units.

Microsoft expects to “get a return” when customers use its cloud platform Azure, said Smith, while Mistral will “get a return” when customers use its AI models.

Also as part of the deal, two of Mistral’s top AI models—Medium 3.5 and OCR 4—will be available in Microsoft’s products, including Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Copilot Studio. Mistral’s models will additionally be available on Azure Local, a Microsoft infrastructure offering that lets customers run their information-technology systems in the cloud or their own data centers. Smith said that option would allow customers to be “disconnected” from the cloud.

“This responds to what we’re hearing from customers and the market,” Smith said. “There is a heightened need for customers to have more choice and more control, and that’s what this gives them.”

This isn’t Microsoft’s first investment in Mistral. The two companies, which began working together in 2023, are targeting a similar segment of European and global business customers that are in regulated sectors such as financial services, manufacturing and healthcare....

....MUCH MORE

It's also another sign of how MSFT is distancing itself from OpenAI. Another couple years and Mr. Nadella will be saying "Sam who?" 

If interested, quite a few of our Mistral links are in July 17's "Airbus migrating 70 critical apps from AWS to France's Scaleway amid digital sovereignty push".

And a couple I forgot to include:

"Why Paris may be the most important AI city outside Silicon Valley"
Though this is an infomercial for one of TechCrunch's products it also happens to be true, though Shenzhen could probably make a claim to that moniker as well....

FrenchTech: "Mistral launches Industrial Engineering AI with Airbus, BMW and EDF as headline customers" (plus rebutting the Pope)

And a couple more from the hazy depths of time gone by (2024):

FrenchTech: "Mistral AI, Europe’s OpenAI rival, adds top LLM to Amazon Bedrock"

FrenchTech: Mistral AI Is Cutting Deals Right and Left
Some adroit, some gauche....

I am so sorry.

FrenchTech: Mistral AI Is Cutting Deals Right and Left

Some adroit, some gauche.

We've already looked at the end-of-February Microsoft hook-up "FrenchTech: "Critics question Microsoft's deal with Mistral AI, as EU set to look into it".

NowVentureBeat tells us (March 5)

Snowflake partners with Mistral AI, taking its open LLMs to the data cloud

Today, Snowflake announced it has signed a multi-year agreement with Mistral, the Paris-based AI startup that raised Europe’s largest-ever seed round in June 2023 and has since become a rising star in the global AI domain.

Under the partnership, Snowflake said it plans to bring all open large language models (LLMs) built by Mistral into its data cloud, making them directly available to customers looking to build LLM apps. The company also confirmed it is investing in the nine-month-old startup through its corporate venture capital arm. However, the exact amount has not been disclosed.

The deal marks another significant vote of confidence for Mistral, which has been moving forward aggressively by teaming with big tech companies. Mistral has also been expanding its model line-up rapidly with its newest Mistral Large model delivering a performance comparable to offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google....

....MUCH MORE

Meaning, if a company should so desire, they could train an AI on their own proprietary data, though doing that in the cloud risks having your most closely guarded secrets at greater risk of theft. Maybe better to use the Snowflake servers as a Mistral-as-a-Service platform and go with the off the shelf training. 

And from InfoQ, also March 5:

Mistral AI Models Are Now Available on Amazon Bedrock 

Mistral AI has made its Mixtral 8x7B and Mistral 7B foundation models available on Amazon Bedrock. These models, now accessible via Amazon Bedrock's single API, aim to offer users a broader selection of high-performing models for building generative AI applications....

....MUCH MORE

Where it will join Anthropic's Claude, Meta's Llama 2 and Stability AI as an LLM option. 

Finally the Wall Street Journal did a long form piece on the company to coincide with the roll-out of Mistral Large (French, German, Spanish, and Italian, in addition to English) which we will look at tomorrow.

"Samsung is in talks to take an equity stake in Mistral AI as the French startup seeks €3 billion at a €20 billion valuation"

From Startup Fortune, July 22:

Samsung Electronics is in active talks to take an equity stake in Mistral AI as part of the French startup's €3 billion fundraising round targeting a €20 billion valuation. The move would shift Samsung from chip supplier to strategic investor, coming days after Microsoft announced a separate multibillion-dollar infrastructure deal with Mistral 

Samsung is reportedly negotiating a much deeper bet on Mistral AI, and the logic is plain: memory suppliers don't want to wait outside the room while Europe's biggest AI startup decides what hardware it needs next.

The Financial Times reported on July 22 that Samsung is in talks to invest hundreds of millions of euros in Mistral AI as part of a funding round that could value the French company at about €20 billion. One person cited by the FT said Samsung could put in roughly €1 billion. That is not a small venture check. It is Samsung trying to buy influence in the part of the AI market where chip supply, model ambition and national politics now meet.

You can see why the talks have substance. Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch visited Samsung's Hwaseong semiconductor campus in Gyeonggi Province on April 2 during French President Emmanuel Macron's state visit to South Korea. The Korea Times, citing Yonhap, reported that Mensch met Jeon Young-hyun, the head of Samsung's device solutions division, to discuss possible cooperation on AI memory, chip supply chains and related technologies. Samsung Venture Investment Corporation had already joined Mistral's June 2024 Series B, the round that valued the startup at about $6 billion. This relationship didn't appear from nowhere.

Samsung wants more than a customer 
What's changed is the size of the bill. Mistral confirmed in September 2025 that ASML led a €1.7 billion Series C at an €11.7 billion post-money valuation. The FT now says the company is seeking a new round around €20 billion. That would be a sharp step up in less than a year, but not a mysterious one. Mistral is no longer only releasing open-weight models and selling API access. It is building compute....

....MUCH MORE 

July 21 - "Microsoft Deepens Ties With Mistral, Targeting Europe and Enterprise AI"
When your company (Mistral) is not just the national standard-bearer but the flagship for the whole continent it's amazing how many companies come knocking on your door.

French Tech: "NVIDIA Partners With Mistral AI to Accelerate New Family of Open Models"

From Nvidia's blog, December 2:

The new Mistral 3 family, spanning frontier-level to compact models, is optimized for NVIDIA platforms, enabling Mistral AI’s vision for distributed intelligence across cloud to the edge. 

Today, Mistral AI announced the Mistral 3 family of open-source multilingual, multimodal models, optimized across NVIDIA supercomputing and edge platforms.  

Mistral Large 3 is a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model — instead of firing up every neuron for every token, it only activates the parts of the model with the most impact. The result is efficiency that delivers scale without waste, accuracy without compromise and makes enterprise AI not just possible, but practical. 

Mistral AI’s new models deliver industry-leading accuracy and efficiency for enterprise AI. It will be available everywhere, from the cloud to the data center to the edge, starting Tuesday, Dec. 2.  

With 41B active parameters, 675B total parameters and a large 256K context window, Mistral Large 3 delivers scalability, efficiency and adaptability for enterprise AI workloads.  

By combining NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 systems and Mistral AI’s MoE architecture, enterprises can efficiently deploy and scale massive AI models, benefiting from advanced parallelism and hardware optimizations.  

This combination makes the announcement a step toward the era of — what Mistral AI calls ‘distributed intelligence,’ bridging the gap between research breakthroughs and real-world applications....

....MUCH MORE 

FrenchTech: "Mistral launches Industrial Engineering AI with Airbus, BMW and EDF as headline customers" (plus rebutting the Pope)

From The Next Web, May 28:

At its first annual conference in Paris, Mistral formally rolled out the physics-aware AI stack it built around the Emmi acquisition, with Airbus, BMW and EDF as launch customers.

---

Mistral AI used its first annual conference in Paris on Thursday to formally launch “Mistral for Industrial Engineering,” a physics-aware AI stack pitched directly at heavy-industry customers, with Airbus, BMW, EDF and the shipping group CMA CGM named as launch deployments.

The product is the commercial layer Mistral has been visibly building toward since its acquisition of Vienna’s Emmi AI earlier this month, and represents the French firm’s clearest articulated alternative to the consumer-and-enterprise-software focus that has defined the largest US foundation-model labs.

The technical core of the offering is what the industry calls simulation surrogate modelling, neural networks trained on the outputs of expensive physics simulators that can subsequently produce comparable answers in seconds rather than hours.

Emmi’s models, originally spun out of Johannes Kepler University Linz and the Austrian AI company NXAI in December 2024, simulate airflow, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics and material deformation in real time.

The category sits cleanly inside what European industrial firms actually need from AI: engineering tools tied to production data, robotics workflows, defect detection and factory operations, rather than another chatbot or code-assistant product.

The customer roster is the most concrete part of the launch. Airbus, the European aerospace heavyweight, joins as a launch customer for the engineering-simulation tier.

BMW, which separately announced earlier this year that it is running humanoid-robot pilots in its Leipzig plant, is using the Mistral stack as part of its industrial-AI competence centre.

EDF, the French state-owned electricity utility, is the third anchor customer named publicly. CMA CGM, the Marseille-based container-shipping group, has been a Mistral customer for over a year and is being positioned inside the new industrial offering.

The named customers reflect the segments Mistral is targeting: aerospace, automotive, energy and logistics.

The strategic positioning is worth pausing on. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google’s frontier labs have spent the past two years competing on consumer-facing chatbots and enterprise-software automation.

The industrial-engineering market has been left visibly under-served. Google’s Fanuc partnership for industrial-robot AI, announced earlier this year, is the closest US analogue....

....MUCH MORE 

For some reason my keyboard is starting to smoke so I'll quick paste this next bit and hit publish:

Mistral’s Arthur Mensch directly rebuts Pope Leo on AI in warfare

"Two Leading European Tech Firms Strike an A.I. Partnership" (ASML; Mistral)

From the New York Times, September 9:

ASML, the Dutch maker of semiconductor equipment, is investing about $1.5 billion in Mistral, the French A.I. start-up. 

Two of Europe’s leading technology companies struck a partnership on Tuesday, with ASML, the Dutch semiconductor equipment maker, investing about $1.5 billion in the French artificial intelligence start-up Mistral.

ASML is one of world’s most strategically significant tech companies because of the role its equipment plays in the production of semiconductors. Mistral is seen as Europe’s most promising artificial intelligence company.

The deal, which values Mistral at 11.7 billion euros, or $13.8 billion, comes amid growing concern across Europe about dependence on American tech companies. Many European leaders fear the region’s lack of progress in technology will leave it economically lagging the United States and China.

The deal illustrates the growing links between developers of artificial intelligence and makers of semiconductors. A.I., which can be trained to perform skills by analyzing vast amounts of data, requires dizzying amounts of computing power from data centers packed with semiconductors.

ASML is at the center of that market because it is the only manufacturer of the machines capable of creating the world’s most advanced chips. One ASML machine can cost as much as $400 million.

Mistral, founded two year ago in Paris, is seen by many in Europe as the region’s best chance to compete against larger American A.I. developers like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Mistral is also facing stiff competition from the Chinese firms DeepSeek and Alibaba.

The French start-up has not raised nearly as much money as larger rivals, putting it at a financial disadvantage. Just last week, Anthropic brought in an additional $13 billion, valuing the company at $183 billion.

Under the deal announced on Tuesday, ASML invested €1.3 billion, making it Mistral’s largest shareholder with an ownership of about 11 percent. ASML’s investment was part of a larger €1.7 billion fund-raising round for Mistral. Other investors included DST Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Bpifrance, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Lightspeed and Nvidia.

ASML, whose equipment is vital for manufacturing A.I. chips, has been at the center of the geopolitical debate over the technology. The company has grappled with trade policies that restrict the sale of its most advanced equipment to China and, more recently, tariffs on imports to the United States....

....MUCH MORE 

NYT on ASML, June 5:

How the Maker of the ‘Most Complex Machine Humans Ever Created’ Is Navigating Trade Fights 

A good one to have on your side. Just ask TSMC. 

....At the low end Japan is already making waves.

November 2022: "Highest of High Tech: Japan Is Coming Up Fast In The Chip Equipment Business" 

Taiwan is really counting on ASML to get to the next level:

April 2024:  TSMC: "How We’ll Reach a 1 Trillion Transistor GPU—Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom" 

And China isn't napping. Also April 2024: Chips: "Huawei building vast chip equipment R&D center in Shanghai"

At the moment I don't think ASML has to worry but U.S. policymakers should be dusting off their contingency plans. They have contingency plans, right? I think they're in the same drawer as the CDC's pandemic response folder.

And our outro from November 2023's "Chips: Apple Spent Big Money To Get Taiwan Semi's New 3nm (AAPL; TSM)":

Oh to be smart enough to outcompete ASML in the lithography biz:

Today ASML Holding NV (ASML) has published its 2023 third-quarter results.
    Q3 net sales of €6.7 billion, gross margin of 51.9%, net income of €1.9 billion 

And have the premier manufacturer bragging about using your product:

TSMC says it will have advanced ASML chipmaking tool in 2024

With only one small cloud on the horizon:

Canon’s Advanced Chip Machines to Cost a Fraction of ASML’s Best

A.I. "Mistral to explore designing own chips, CEO says, as it ramps up infrastructure build"

From CNBC, May 28:

• Mistral’s semiconductor ambitions underscore the company’s bid to control more of its infrastructure as it competes with OpenAI and Anthropic.
• The French startup also announced a new data center in France designed specifically for inferencing.
• “Europe is lagging behind when it comes to [the] buildout of infrastructure, and so we are investing to close that gap,” CEO Arthur Mensch told CNBC.

French startup Mistral AI is exploring designing its own chips and may eventually develop them, CEO Arthur Mensch told CNBC.

It is the first comment made by Mensch about Mistral’s semiconductor ambitions, underscoring how the company is looking to control more of its infrastructure as it competes with U.S. heavyweights OpenAI and Anthropic.

“Of course, it is interesting,” Mensch said about the prospect of Mistral developing its own chips, adding that the company is not ruling it out.

Mensch said that custom chips allow a company to “lower the cost of deploying tokens to meaningful extents.” Tokens are units of data processed by AI models.

“Owning the chips may come, I think it should come at some point, but for now we are relying on Nvidia, which is a great partner to us, and we’re testing a few things here and there,” Mensch told CNBC.

Mistral, which is valued at nearly 12 billion euros, develops AI models but is also investing in building data centers with Nvidia chips. The Paris-headquartered firm is often seen as Europe’s answer to OpenAI and Anthropic.

The company is focused on enterprise and counts companies such as chip equipment giant ASML among its top customers.

If Mistral were to develop its own chips, it would follow in the footsteps of the big American hyperscalers such as Amazon and Google, which have designed and deployed their own semiconductors in their data centers.

Custom chips, also known as an application-specific integrated circuit, are seen as a way for hyperscalers to have more control over their hardware and software integrations, potentially offering a differentiated product from competitors.

Data center expansion 
Mistral announced on Thursday a new data center in France designed specifically for inferencing, which is the actual process of running AI models....

....MUCH MORE 

"France's unicorn start-up Mistral AI embodies its artificial intelligence hopes"

More on Mistral. They are going to have to hire some hyper-brains. Go to Toronto, go to Carnegie Mellon, get beyond ChatGPT and the large language models. 

Elon Musk is trying to poach some OpenAI talent, time to follow his lead.

From Le Monde, December 12:

With prestigious researchers, strong political backing and €385 million in raised funds, this open-source start-up aims to develop language processing models capable of rivaling OpenAI, Google and Meta. 

In the land of start-ups, Mistral AI's story has all the makings of a fairy tale. In June, the young French artificial intelligence (AI) company made a big splash by raising €105 million just a few weeks after its launch, when it still had neither products nor revenues.

On Monday, December 11, it impressed with a new €385 million round of financing, and a €2 billion valuation – already propelling it into the coveted realm of unicorns, those start-ups valued at over $1 billion. Its 31-year-old CEO, Arthur Mensch, has set his sights high: "We are pursuing a clear trajectory: To create a European champion with a global vocation in generative artificial intelligence, based on an open, responsible and decentralized approach to technology."

In other words, Mistral AI wants to launch language processing models capable of competing with those of American giants such as OpenAI – creator of ChatGPT – Google and Meta. US investment funds Andreessen Horowitz and LightSpeed Ventures led the new round of funding. They were joined by Salesforce, BNP Paribas and CMA CGM, plus first-round shareholders such as Bpifrance, the La Famiglia fund and Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google).

'Lobbying'
Mistral AI's appeal stems from its team's prestigious profiles: The three co-founders combine French academic excellence in mathematics and computer science with experience working for leading American AI giants – Arthur Mensch graduated from two elite French universities, Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole Normale Supérieure, before working for Google DeepMind. Technical Director Thimothée Lacroix spent eight years at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and then joined Meta. There, he worked on LLaMA, the language processing model used by that same parent company of Facebook and Instagram, with Mistral AI's scientific director, Guillaume Lample, also a Polytechnique alumnus....

....MUCH MORE

Recently:

French OpenAI Rival Mistral Nears $2 Billion Valuation With Andreessen Horowitz Backing
This. This is what we've been pitching for the last five years as the way France picks up the economic torch from Germany....

French Tech: "Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch’s $1.4B Data Center Push Powers Europe’s A.I. Autonomy"

French, with a Swedish accent.

From Observer, February 12:

Arthur Mensch is turning Mistral into Europe’s strongest contender for sovereign A.I. infrastructure and technological independence. 

Mistral AI co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch knows that it isn’t just France but all of Europe that relies on his startup to deliver an alternative to U.S. powerhouses like OpenAI. In its first-ever foreign A.I. infrastructure investment, the Paris-based company is committing 1.2 billion euros ($1.4 billion) to build data centers across Sweden, it announced yesterday (Feb. 11).

“This investment is a concrete step towards building independent capabilities in Europe, dedicated to A.I.,” said Mensch in a statement. The move will focus on expanding advanced compute capacity and localized A.I. capabilities, and is expected to further reinforce the region’s “strategic autonomy and competitiveness,” he added. 

Mensch previously worked on large language models and multimodal systems at Google DeepMind before co-founding Mistral in 2023 alongside former Meta researchers Guillaume Lample and Timotheé Lacroix. Best known for its “Le Chat” chatbot, Mistral sits at the center of Europe’s ambition to build sovereign A.I. independent of Silicon Valley....

....MUCH MORE 

Our last post on Mistral was January 27's "French AI firm Mistral predicts revenue of €1 billion in 2026".

FrenchTech: "Mistral AI's CEO says Europe has 2 years to stop becoming America's AI 'vassal state'"

At the rate AI capability is accelerating, being behind by only eighteen months means you are behind forever. 

Not even close to kidding on that.

From Business Insider, May 16: 

• Mistral CEO said Europe has 2 years to avoid dependence on US AI infrastructure giants.
• Arthur Mensch warned AI dominance will hinge on control of chips, energy, and compute capacity.
• Europe risks becoming an AI "vassal state," Mensch told French lawmakers.

Two years.

That's the narrow window Europe has to build its own artificial intelligence infrastructure before becoming permanently dependent on American tech giants, according to Arthur Mensch, the CEO of French AI startup Mistral.

"It will be decided in the next two years," Mensch said during a Tuesday hearing on digital sovereignty and AI at France's National Assembly, translated by Business Insider.

The 33-year-old cofounder of Mistral — one of Europe's best-funded AI startups and a challenger to OpenAI — said that the continent risks losing control over not just AI models, but the energy and computing infrastructure powering them.

"Once supply is monopolized by American players, suddenly we no longer have supply and we can no longer transform electrons into tokens," Mensch said, referring to the process of converting computing power into AI-generated output.

He even said that Europe could eventually become "a vassal state" if it fails to develop its own AI industry and continues importing digital services from the US.

Europe's sovereignty push

Mensch has repeatedly touted sovereignty and Europe's independence from American AI companies as central to Mistral's open-source strategy, saying recently that governments increasingly want AI systems they can control independently of US tech giants.

The Paris-based startup has continued leaning into that message in recent announcements, including a partnership with Groupe Caisse des Dépôts, a state-backed French public investment institution, focused on strengthening Europe's "digital sovereignty" through generative AI and GPU computing infrastructure.

On Tuesday, Mensch warned that the AI race is increasingly a battle over access to energy, chips, and data center capacity.

US tech companies are already moving aggressively to secure those resources, he said, adding that Europe risks falling behind permanently if it moves too slowly.

Mensch has repeatedly touted sovereignty and Europe's independence from American AI companies as central to Mistral's open-source strategy, saying recently that governments increasingly want AI systems they can control independently of US tech giants.

The Paris-based startup has continued leaning into that message in recent announcements, including a partnership with Groupe Caisse des Dépôts, a state-backed French public investment institution, focused on strengthening Europe's "digital sovereignty" through generative AI and GPU computing infrastructure.

On Tuesday, Mensch warned that the AI race is increasingly a battle over access to energy, chips, and data center capacity.

US tech companies are already moving aggressively to secure those resources, he said, adding that Europe risks falling behind permanently if it moves too slowly.

"The Americans are deploying a trillion dollars next year," Mensch said. "The one who controls the chips, who controls the electrons, who has massive access to energy — that's the one who wins."

The infrastructure case....

....MUCH MORE 

 He's talking his book of course, he wants some government help but he's also talking truth.

And trying to do something about it. Reuters, March 29:

France's Mistral raises $830 million in debt for AI data centre build-up 

You don't want to end every phone call with Nvidia's Jensen Huang by saying "Yes, my Liege, as you wish my Liege." 

French OpenAI Rival Mistral Nears $2 Billion Valuation With Andreessen Horowitz Backing

This. This is what we've been pitching for the last five years as the way France picks up the economic torch from Germany.

From Bloomberg, December 4:

• French AI startup is set to raise about €450 million in round
• Adviser Cedric O is among insiders set to sell partial stakes

Mistral AI is in the final stages of raising roughly €450 million ($487 million) from investors including Nvidia Corp. and Salesforce Inc. in a funding round that values the OpenAI rival at about $2 billion, according to people familiar with the deal.

The deal includes more than €325 million in equity from investors led by Andreessen Horowitz, which is in talks to invest €200 million in funding, the people said, asking not to be identified because the discussions are private. Nvidia and Salesforce agreed to contribute another €120 million in convertible debt, they said. Some of the details are in flux and may still change, the people said.

The startup’s three co-founders agreed to sell more than €1 million apiece in equity as part of the deal, according to documents detailing the transaction terms that Bloomberg reviewed. Three other Mistral insiders are set to offload shares, including Cedric O, the former French minister who acts as chief adviser for the company, and plans to sell nearly €1 million, according to the term sheet.

A spokesperson for Mistral declined to comment. Representatives for Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia and Salesforce declined to comment. O didn’t respond to requests for comment....

....MUCH MORE

On Mistral, June 14:

French Tech: "Mistral AI secures €105M in Europe’s largest-ever seed round"

Although we've been pitching French startups as a potential engine of growth to supplant German dominance, and although we've made Artificial Intelligence one of the foci of the blog since 2013 - "Why Is Machine Learning (CS 229) The Most Popular Course At Stanford"  - and although we began juxtaposing the two strands five years ago, I'm still  impressed with this sort of money going into a company that was formed in the last five weeks.

From The Next Web, June 14:

Leading VC says new generation of global players will emerge from European ecosystem 

The artificial intelligence hype shows no sign of fading just yet, and investors are practically falling over themselves to fund the next big thing in AI. Yesterday, Paris-based startup Mistral AI announced it had secured €105mn in what is reportedly Europe’s largest-ever seed round. 

Mistral AI was founded only four weeks ago, by a trio of AI researchers. Arthur Mensch, the company’s CEO, was formerly employed by Google’s DeepMind. His co-founders, Timothée Lacroix (CTO) and Guillaume Lample (Chief Science Officer), previously worked for Meta. 

The company has yet to develop its first product. However, on a mission to “make AI useful,” it plans to launch a large language model (LLM) similar to the system behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT in early 2024. 

A large part of the funds raised will be used towards renting the computer power to train it. The idea is to only use publicly available data to avoid the legal issues and copyright backlash faced by others in the industry....

....MUCH MORE

July 17:
"...Big Tech Alumni building AI startups in Paris"

On Cedric O:

November 7, 2021
"France Fintech and Binance Announce Creation of EUR100 Million Crypto and Blockchain Initiative in France"

So far just the press release, we'll see if anything develops.
It was the mention of Cedric O* that caught my eye, he seems sharp although I don't know how much he and the government will back the venture.

From Business Insider:

France FinTech, a leading non-profit association whose mission is to promote FinTech excellence in France, and Binance, the world's leading blockchain ecosystem and cryptocurrency exchange, today announced the launch of a EUR100 Million initiative to support the development of the French and European blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Speaking at a conference today with Cédric O, Minister of State for the Digital Transition and Electronic Communication in France at the French Ministry of Finance in Paris, Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, founder and CEO of Binance announced the launch of the initiative, called "Objective Moon", that will comprise three key cryptocurrency and blockchain innovation projects in France.

The EUR100 million initiative, which will be funded by Binance, will see the development of a Binance Research and Development hub in France, along with the creation of a Decentralized Ledger Technology (DLT) accelerator and a new online Education Programme to develop blockchain and crypto industry talent in France. The education programme will be created in partnership with OpenClassroom and Ledger....

...MUCH MORE
*If interested see:
Q&A with M. Macron's New Digital Minister, Cédric O, on Tech in France
"Why French startups seem to focus on their home market & what’s changing" 

Related:
June 18: "France makes high-profile push to be the A.I. hub of Europe setting up challenge to U.S., China"
June 11: "Report: France's Macron Seeks Seat at AI Table"

And back into the mists of time (well, the twenty-teens):

"French government officials advocate for a €500m investment in blockchain technology"
The country might be better served adding to the €1.5 billion that President Macron has pledged for research in Artificial Intelligence.
But I might be biased....Related:
France: "For Emmanuel Macron, AI is more than a technological revolution. It is a political revolution of hope in an increasingly dystopian future"
"The Race is On for European AI Research"
Profit From The Global Riot Control Industry
"The Top-10 French Artificial Intelligence Startups"
The Creator of the iPod and the iPhone Seeks to Dethrone Tech’s Giants
It’s a crisp January morning in Paris’s 13th Arrondissement, and outside Station F, the former freight terminal that is the epicenter of France’s startup scene, twentysomethings climb out of cars hailed using iPhone apps.
Tony Fadell’s Next Act? Taking on Silicon Valley—From Paris

"‘The Disruptors’ — Unique insight into Europe’s 1,600 AI startups (Part 2)"
I was about to headline this link "The 1600 AI Startups you must know" to play off the "672 thought leaders you must follow on Twitter" or the "37,000 young people who want to take your job" articles but then realized our wary-yet-intrigued readers are not the type of people who respond well to someone saying they 'must' do anything.

Venture Capital: "These 12 startups could be France’s next unicorns"

From Sifted.eu, February 14:

Verkor and Mistral AI have left big shoes to fill — and these startups might be the next ones to do it 

French president Emmanuel Macron is well-known for his love of unicorns.

In 2022, when sky-high company valuations were still fashionable, he set an ambitious target of hitting 100 French unicorns by 2030. Two years later, the country counts 30 startups that have reached a $1bn valuation — with the latest addition to the club, Paris-based fintech Pennylane, hitting the milestone a week ago.

That doesn’t mean that reaching president Macron’s objective will be easy. Last year, France saw only two startups become unicorns — battery manufacturer Verkor and AI newbie Mistral, with the latter managing to launch, raise almost €500m and unlock a $2bn valuation all in the same year. 

This compares to eight new unicorns in 2022 and 17 in 2021. Like the rest of Europe, France is feeling the hit of the downturn.

So, who will be next on the list? Sifted looked through Dealroom data to find out which French startups are likely to power through a challenging context and achieve the much coveted unicorn status next. 

Electra

Founding date: 2021

Latest valuation: Just under $1bn

With Electra’s latest round of funding, a €304m Series B earlier this year, CEO Aurélien de Meaux told Sifted the company was close to becoming a unicorn. The startup is building a network of fast-charging stations for electric vehicles — a market that is expected to explode as consumers make the switch to greener cars. 

Pigment 

Founding date: 2019

Latest valuation: $850m

Pigment’s business planning software  pulls together data that finance teams need to have a comprehensive view of the company and to model financial decisions. Last year, it bagged an $88m Series C at an $850m valuation led by US investor ICONIQ, which came off the back of a 600% increase in revenue and a 10-fold increase in users throughout 2022, according to the company. 

Deepki

Founding date: 2014

Latest valuation: $660-990m, according to a Dealroom estimate 

Deepki collects and aggregates data on sustainability metrics like carbon emissions, water and energy usage and waste, as well as other ESG measurements for business customers. It raised a $150m Series C in March 2022, followed in 2023 by a partnership with US property management company CBRE, which made an investment, of an undisclosed size, in the company....

....MUCH MORE

We'll have more on Mistral next week. Previously:
French Tech: "Mistral AI secures €105M in Europe’s largest-ever seed round"

Although we've been pitching French startups as a potential engine of growth to supplant German dominance, and although we've made Artificial Intelligence one of the foci of the blog since 2013 - "Why Is Machine Learning (CS 229) The Most Popular Course At Stanford" - and although we began juxtaposing the two strands five years ago, I'm still impressed with this sort of money going into a company that was formed in the last five weeks.

"...Big Tech Alumni building AI startups in Paris"

"France's unicorn start-up Mistral AI embodies its artificial intelligence hopes"

French OpenAI Rival Mistral Nears $2 Billion Valuation With Andreessen Horowitz Backing
This. This is what we've been pitching for the last five years as the way France picks up the economic torch from Germany....

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says AI to See ‘Major Second Wave (NVDA)

AI to See ‘Major Second Wave,’ NVIDIA CEO Says in Fireside Chat With iliad Group Exec
NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang says sovereign AI a growing need for countries to reflect unique cultural, linguistic, industrial characteristics
European startups will get a massive boost from a new generation of AI infrastructure, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said Friday in a fireside chat with iliad Group Deputy CEO Aude Durand — and it’s coming just in time.