French AI start-up Mistral is seeking to raise several billion euros at a €20bn valuation, with Samsung among the investors in discussions to back the round, the Financial Times reported today.

Samsung is in advanced talks to invest as much as €1bn in Paris-based AI start-up Mistral, in a new funding round that would lift the company’s valuation to €20bn, according to the Financial Times.

The South Korean conglomerate, which previously backed Mistral through its venture arm, is discussing the investment as part of a broader round expected to raise several billion euros in total, according to people familiar with the matter cited by the FT.

Swedish investor EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund, backed by Brussels and managed by EQT, is also in talks to participate, alongside private investors including Novo Holdings and Santander.

The talks reflect growing appetite for European AI alternatives following the Trump administration’s decision to block foreign access to Anthropic’s latest Mythos and Fable models, a move that has sparked fresh interest in what the industry calls “sovereign AI” capacity.

Since its founding in 2023, Mistral has focused on open models that can be customised and deployed without dependence on US cloud providers, meaning no company or government can switch them off.

The round represents a significant step up from Mistral’s previous €12bn valuation, set less than a year ago in a deal led by Dutch chip equipment maker ASML.

Mistral this week announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft, one of its earliest investors, which made a “multibillion-dollar commitment” to use Mistral’s computing infrastructure, providing a stable revenue stream the company can borrow against as it continues to scale.

In March, Mistral raised $830m in its first debt financing, supported by a consortium of seven global banks, to fund the construction of a data centre at Bruyeres-le-Chatel near Paris. The facility, equipped with 13,800 Nvidia GB300 GPUs and 44MW of powered capacity, is designed to train AI models and deliver inference services for Mistral and its enterprise customers.

The company separately committed more than $1.4bn for digital infrastructure in Sweden, as part of a broader target of 200MW of capacity across Europe by 2027.

“Scaling our infrastructure in Europe is critical to empower our customers and to ensure AI innovation and autonomy remain at the heart of Europe,” chief executive Arthur Mensch said at the time.

Founded in 2023, Mistral is Europe’s most valuable AI start-up. Mensch told the FT in February that annual recurring revenues were on track to exceed $1bn by the end of this year.

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