In addition to a €1.3 billion investment and an 11 percent stake in French company Mistral AI, chip machine manufacturer ASML is aiming for more. A long-term collaboration agreement will bring AI models to the entire production line of the Dutch lithography company.
ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet says that joint research between his company and Mistral AI offers many opportunities. “We believe that this strategic partnership with Mistral AI, which goes beyond a traditional vendor-client relationship, is the best way to capture this significant opportunity. We also believe that this collaboration is value enhancing to Mistral AI.”
Read also: ASML becomes largest shareholder in Mistral AI after 1.3B euro deal
More than the sum of two parts
Based on Reuters reporting, we speculated on Monday that ASML would not be just any investor in the young Mistral AI, founded in 2023. The only European AI model builder that can compete with the American and Chinese giants is a logical partner for ASML. Unlike Google or OpenAI, Mistral AI’s revenue model is explicitly focused on business applications, with several small models (“ministraux”) that are domain-specific already available.
One example of this is the focus on OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which is primarily designed to recognize letters and numbers but can be used much more broadly. At its core, it involves visual pattern recognition that can be applied to production lines the world over, with Mistral OCR having a lower error rate than when Google Gemini tries to perform the same task or if OpenAI’s GPT-5 has a go.
Two worlds
Tech giants such as Microsoft and Apple have already opted for strategic partnerships with a leading AI player, in both cases OpenAI. For a moment, it looked as if Apple would open its checkbook and acquire Mistral, but founder and CEO Arthur Mensch says his company is “not for sale.” An IPO is the logical next step, although no concrete steps have been taken to do so in the short term.
An exit would be lucrative for ASML, which as of today owns 11 percent of Mistral AI. It also has a seat on Mistral AI’s Strategic Committee, where it will play an advisory role. Everything indicates that ASML is primarily seeking a degree of control and cooperation with an AI company, rather than simply acting as a customer. CEO Fouquet also says this in today’s press release, but that is also completely obvious beyond the PR-generic quotes. An additional advantage for Europe is that the capital influence on the continent’s most promising AI company remains within the EU borders.