Samsung deepens its AI empire with a potential billion-euro stake in Europe's hottest AI startup
Quick Answer
Samsung is negotiating a potential €1 billion investment in French AI startup Mistral, increasing its valuation to €20 billion.
Quick Take
This follows a previous investment in 2024 and comes alongside Mistral's expansion of its partnership with Microsoft, which includes significant spending on compute infrastructure and scaling GPU capacity with Nvidia chips.
Key Points
- Mistral's valuation has surged from €12 billion to €20 billion in less than a year.
- Samsung previously invested in Mistral through its venture arm in 2024.
- Mistral plans to exceed $1 billion in annual revenue by year-end.
- Microsoft is committing billions to Mistral's compute infrastructure.
- Mistral is enhancing GPU capacity with thousands of Nvidia Vera Rubin chips.
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~1 min read
Jul 22, 2026
Samsung is in talks to invest up to one billion euros in French AI startup Mistral, which would push the company's valuation to around 20 billion euros. That's according to the Financial Times. Less than a year ago, Mistral was valued at 12 billion euros. Samsung already invested in Mistral through its venture arm in 2024, and Swedish investor EQT is reportedly also participating in the new round. Samsung keeps expanding its footprint in the AI industry. The company is one of the world's largest memory chip makers and is also in talks with Anthropic about manufacturing a custom AI chip.
Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said in a February interview that he expects annual revenue to top one billion dollars by year's end. Just this week, Mistral also expanded its partnership with Microsoft, with the US company committing to billions of dollars in spending on Mistral's compute infrastructure. Mistral is scaling up its GPU capacity with thousands of Nvidia Vera Rubin chips and making its models available through Microsoft's Azure cloud, including in air-gapped environments without internet access for regulated industries like finance and healthcare.
— Originally published at the-decoder.com
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