Samsung is reportedly in talks to invest as much as €1 billion (US$1.14 billion) into Mistral, the French AI startup company, according to The Financial Times.

If confirmed, a move like this would significantly advance Mistral’s efforts to become a leading company in AI, rivalling US technology giants. Samsung is reportedly discussing the investment as part of a broader fundraising round that could value Mistral at around €20 billion ($22.8 billion), according to people who spoke with The Financial Times.

The report comes during Mistral’s extensive efforts to advance its AI strategy, seeking to capitalise on growing interest from companies and governments in AI organisations outside of the US. This comes after US President Donald Trump’s administration placed controls and restrictions on the likes of Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models.

Mistral has always focused on open AI models that can be customised and controlled by customers, which could support desires in the industry for ‘AI and data sovereignty’.

Interest remains high in the company, which recently raised $830 million in a debt financing round to purchase 13,800 Nvidia chips for an AI-enabled data centre close to Paris. Mistral said at the time the deal marked its first debt raising and followed demand for AI across Europe, as the continent lookd to scale AI infrastructure to compete with US and China dominance.

“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 in March, as part of a statement that was shared with Reuters.

This week, Mistral also expanded its partnership with Microsoft in a multibillion-dollar commitment that will see Microsoft using Mistral’s computing infrastructure. With such a stable source of revenue from one of its first investors, the deal is also expected to help Mistral fund its own investment in computing capacity.

“Our mission has always been to put frontier AI in the hands of every organisation while keeping them in control of their technology,” said Mensch. “With Microsoft as our partner, our models reach enterprises and public institutions at global scale – delivered through a platform trusted for the most demanding, regulated workloads and available everywhere our customers operate.”

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