ASML is reportedly becoming the main shareholder of French AI company Mistral AI through a €1.3 billion investment in the new €1.7 billion financing round. The new valuation of €10 billion makes Mistral the most valuable AI company in Europe.
ASML’s €1.3 billion should help Mistral as a European AI player in a battle dominated by American parties. Only China’s DeepSeek has managed to break the hegemony of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta.
ASML’s stake immediately gives it significant influence. According to sources at Reuters, the Dutch company will acquire a majority stake and a seat on the board of the French AI developer. The total financing round of €1.7 billion values Mistral at €10 billion prior to the investment.
European growth
The deal connects two European technology leaders, however different they may be. ASML manufactures lithography machines that are crucial for advanced chip production. According to Reuters, the company can benefit from Mistral’s AI capabilities for data analysis and product improvement. These go beyond language models alone: the French AI specialist also focuses on OCR (optical character recognition), which could potentially be translated into the recognition of deviations on ASML’s production line, where deviations in nanometers are often too large.
As the sole supplier of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, ASML is a crucial player for chip manufacturers such as TSMC and Intel. These systems cost around €150 million each and are essential for the production of the most advanced processors.
Mistral, founded in 2023 by former DeepMind and Meta researchers, competes with American giants such as OpenAI and Google. Last year, the company was valued at €5 billion after a Series B round. It is a fast-growing company, with some caveats. Whereas DeepSeek amazed the AI world with the then-astonishing R1 at the beginning of this year, Mistral has not yet made a real breakthrough. It distinguishes itself with open-source models, which are often small and effective for their size and more multilingual than the competition.
Bank of America reportedly advised ASML on the investment. Both ASML and Mistral declined to comment on the reports.
Unsolicited but welcome
The fact that European tech companies support each other can be seen as a good thing. ASML is the figurehead of high-tech in both the Netherlands and Europe, while Mistral, with no real peers, is the largest AI player on the continent. Yet it is not the most obvious match. A takeover of Mistral by Apple was discussed internally in Cupertino, but now seems further away than ever. It could have helped the sluggish Apple Intelligence, but now this will have to be done through its own AI models, another takeover, or a new partnership.
ASML is unlikely to exert too much influence on Mistral. The same thing happened when the fledgling ASML (under the name ASM Lithography) was founded as a joint venture by Philips and ASMI. We discussed the story in brief last year:
Read also: ASML: from a leaky shed to the chip industry’s key player