Samsung backs Mistral in record-breaking €3 billion funding round as French AI firm targets sovereign AI gains

French AI giant Mistral has raised €3 billion to support frontier model research and development of sovereign, open-weight systems.

The funding, led by Samsung Electronics and Scaleup Europe Fund, is the largest equity round by a European tech company and values Mistral at €21 billion.

The aim is to train "bigger and faster models", CEO Arthur Mensch told CNBC, but Mistral also said in a blog post that its focus was open-weight models built and run in Europe that allow companies to keep hold of their data.

"During the first wave of generative AI, the central question was who could build the most powerful model," the company said in a blog post.

"Organizations and governments are now asking a different one: how to harness the power of AI for their mission-critical needs without surrendering control over the infrastructure and intelligence loop."

Mistral added that demand for a “combination of performance and control, choice, and independence” is growing globally.

The company said enterprises are governments alike are now weighing up long-term tech dependencies, governance requirements and “deployment choices that come with any AI investment”.

Mistral eyes sovereign AI gains

The importance of sovereign AI was made clear earlier this year when Anthropic's security models were temporarily hit by an export ban.

More generally, countries like France and Switzerland are pushing away from American technology firms for their own versions of software and services for government use.

Mistral in particular has positioned itself as an alternative not only to American dominance, but also the open-weight models developed in China.

"The fact that the EU or Europe have to have their own kind of AI provider in the game is important," chief financial officer Johan Bergqvist told Reuters.

"We ​have seen in the past ​that there is ⁠politics involved in the access of these solutions, and it's important that you make sure that you maintain access and do not compromise your kind of supply ​chain,” he added.

That said, Mistral noted that it was seeing particular growth in Asia and North America, with more than 125 global enterprises as customers based in 20 countries.

"The round reflects a strategic endorsement from investors across Europe, Asia and North America," Mistral said in the blog post.

"It brings together a world-class syndicate of strategic and financial investors, including global technology leaders, growth investors and existing shareholders that have supported Mistral’s development to date."

Paying for the AI rollout

Beyond investing in frontier research, the funding round will be used to boost AI infrastructure available to Mistral, Mensch said.

"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," Mensch told CNBC.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Mensch added that the funding will allow Mistral to reach an "amount of compute that is very comparable to what the Chinese labs have."

However, the investment is small compared to the figures coming out of the US, with $1trn set to be spent on AI infrastructure this year alone, and rivals such as Anthropic and OpenAI valued at $965bn and $852bn ahead of looming IPOs.

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