A South Korean conglomerate that sells phones, memory chips and household appliances is weighing a bet on the most prominent AI startup in Europe. Samsung Electronics is in discussions to invest several hundred million euros in Mistral AI, with the figure possibly reaching about one billion euros, according to people familiar with the matter. The round, which is still taking shape, could value the Paris-based company at roughly €20 billion, or about $22.8 billion, nearly double what investors paid in its last funding.
The investment would be one of the largest single bets on European AI, and it is being assembled at a moment when Mistral is working to raise capital on several fronts. The company has been in talks with a group of global investors since June, and Bloomberg reported that a roughly €3 billion round was being discussed at a valuation near €20 billion. Samsung’s contribution would sit alongside commitments from other prospective backers, including EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund, Novo Holdings and Santander, according to reports citing people close to the negotiations.
Samsung’s interest is strategic on several levels. The company is one of the world’s largest makers of memory chips, and AI has transformed its industry: every accelerator sold by Nvidia and its rivals needs high-bandwidth memory, and Samsung competes with SK Hynix and Micron for that business. A relationship with a major AI lab gives Samsung a direct line into the demand side of the market it supplies, and executives have said privately that the company wants to be seen as a partner to AI companies, not just a component vendor to them.
The investment also fits Samsung’s broader push into artificial intelligence. The company has built AI features into its Galaxy phones, invested in its own semiconductor foundry business and formed partnerships across the industry, but it has lacked the kind of anchor relationship with a frontier AI lab that Microsoft, Amazon and now AMD have established with OpenAI and Anthropic. Mistral, with its European base and its reputation for efficient models, offers Samsung a way into that club at a price far below what an American lab would command.
For Mistral, the money answers the constraint that defines its generation of AI companies: computing. The company secured $830 million in debt financing in March for data center expansion, and the equity round, if completed, would bring its total financing to roughly €6.5 billion. The cash is earmarked for the GPU clusters and power contracts that frontier AI requires, and the company’s own infrastructure push, which includes thousands of Nvidia Vera Rubin processors under its expanded partnership with Microsoft, depends on the round closing.
Mistral’s rise has been unusually fast. Founded in 2023 by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix, all former researchers at American AI companies, the lab reached unicorn status within months and was valued at €5.8 billion in mid-2024. ASML, the Dutch chip-equipment maker, led its September 2025 round, taking an 11 percent stake for €1.3 billion and becoming its largest shareholder, a pairing that surprised an industry accustomed to American capital dominating AI. Nvidia, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, DST Global, Index Ventures, Lightspeed and Bpifrance, the French public investment bank, are also on the cap table.
The negotiations are not finished, and the people familiar with them cautioned that terms could change before any agreement is signed. Neither Samsung nor Mistral has confirmed the discussions, and the final size of the round, the valuation and the list of investors all remain in motion.
The round also carries political significance in Europe, where governments have made AI sovereignty a priority and where American capital has dominated every major AI investment. A round anchored by European institutions and joined by a Korean industrial giant would show that the continent’s champions can raise money beyond the usual American sources, a point French officials have pressed in public for years. Samsung’s participation adds manufacturing credibility to a company that has spent heavily on data centers, and it gives Seoul a stake in the European AI story at a time when both regions are trying to reduce dependence on American technology. Such caution is standard in private fundraising, but it carries particular weight here because the round has been reported for six weeks without a close, and the gap between reports and signatures is where deals most often die.
The deal, if it lands, would be a signal about the direction of AI capital. Money is flowing to infrastructure in record volumes, from OpenAI’s $750 billion plan to TSMC’s Arizona buildout, but equity investments in the labs themselves have been concentrated in a handful of American companies. A Korean industrial giant paying €1 billion for a stake in a French AI lab would show that the capital base for frontier AI is widening, and that European and Asian companies are willing to pay for a seat at the table rather than rent capacity by the hour.
For Samsung, the price of admission is small next to its annual capital budget, which routinely exceeds $40 billion. The strategic question is whether a minority stake in Mistral turns into a durable relationship, or whether it becomes a footnote in a round that was really about someone else’s ambitions. The answer will depend on what the two companies do after the check clears, and neither has said yet.
