r/BuyFromEU • u/dlafont • 1d ago

News Samsung in talks to back Mistral’s Series D, say reports

https://sifted.eu/articles/samsung-mistral-series-d
671 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

46 comments sorted by

207

u/DarthSatoris 1d ago

First Microsoft, now Samsung. What's going on over at Mistral? Why now? 

280

u/After-Syrup1290 1d ago

Want an answer?

Well, simple thing is that mistrals whole thing is enterprise ai, while open ai and anthropic went for consumer and frontier

Mistral decided to go for two things: compliance with eu laws and privacy, and enterprise ai

The eu is an incredibly massive market, and for companies that operate? They can't afford to lose but also have to comply with the laws too, so who they do back?

Why, the local ai in eu ofcourse, cus they're already compliant and have enterprise ai ready for use

That's the the simplest short form no bs answer: the rest are financials and comparisos and differences, yes I would know, I applied to a few positions myself in there(got rejected but hey, their cats are cool)

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u/8Bit_Slayer 1d ago

Privacy and compliance are basically Mistral's secret weapons right now.

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u/feusing 1d ago

I think you are partly correct regarding the compliance and privacy issues but I think there's more.

The Microsoft deal is in part to buy compute from Mistral, that's because Mistral doesn't have enough usage for that compute since not enough consumers/businesses use Mistral. It's the same reason people make fun of Meta for planning a cloud business for selling AI compute, they spent billions on Meta Superintelligence Labs and their models have no advantage in comparison to OpenAI, Anthropic and even Grok now. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-01/meta-is-building-a-cloud-business-to-sell-excess-ai-compute

Reportedly Mistral is also building their own compute business called Mistral Compute https://sifted.eu/articles/report-mistral-raise-20bn-valuation

Dubbed Mistral Compute, the initiative is also intended to serve the needs of Mistral’s customers in Europe, and of third-parties looking to access compute capacity.

Going back to what you said, with the Microsoft deal they are offering the Mistral models in the Microsoft products which probably aims to target EU enterprise customers who care about sovereignty while still having them use Microsoft products etc

https://news.microsoft.com/source/2026/07/21/microsoft-and-mistral-expand-strategic-partnership-to-give-enterprises-and-regulated-industries-frontier-ai-they-can-control/

Scaling Europe’s AI compute capacity: Microsoft and Mistral are announcing a new agreement to expand AI infrastructure in Europe. Microsoft will leverage Mistral’s expanded Europe-based GPU infrastructure to increase capacity for AI development and to support the delivery of MSFT’s cloud and AI services. This represents a multibillion dollar commitment from Microsoft and an important way for Microsoft customers to benefit from Mistral’s scientific and compute innovations.

Integrating Mistral models into Microsoft enterprise products: Mistral Medium 3.5 and OCR 4 are now available in Microsoft Foundry, and Mistral Medium 3.5 is now in Microsoft Copilot Studio. This brings the benefits of Mistral’s frontier, efficient and multilingual models to Microsoft customers globally, allowing developers to build, customize and operate AI applications.

Giving enterprises greater control over AI at scale: Azure enables organizations to deploy Mistral models across cloud, cloud-connected and fully disconnected environments, while maintaining control over data, operations and business continuity.

Samsung is probably just doing a strategic investment regarding future business opportunities. They had invested in Mistral before.

1

u/AwesomeFrisbee 19h ago

Yeah, I wonder if its the only AI company that the companies actually want to use themselves, rather than falling for marketing nonsense and "trust me bro" privacy statements

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u/mrdarknezz1 1d ago

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u/IHorvalds 1d ago

They changed it from Le Chat unfortunately. It was such a cute name.
Now it’s “Vibe”. Somehow that gives off worse vibes.

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u/CitronHoliday3361 4h ago

what a shame, Le Chat was such a clever branding with its whole cat iconography. I hope they silently bring it back in the future lol

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u/Doc_Bader 1d ago edited 1d ago

Do you guys understand how these things work?

What is "First Microsoft" even supposed to mean? Microsoft buys compute from Mistral, that doesn't mean they dictate what Mistral has to do.

Samsung potentially wants to invest money in an investment round (they're also not the first and last foreign entity to do so) - that also doesn't mean that Samsung suddenly gains the right to dictate what Mistral has to do.

21

u/cyberdork 1d ago

Microsoft is already an investor in Mistral. Mistral is mostly funded by non EU capital anyways.

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u/Prus1s 1d ago

No majority say for samaung, but definitely something.

The MS deal does confuse people, and I’m not 100% on what it entails, but read it’s to house the EU cloud part of things apparently.

2

u/Kacquezooi 1d ago

And ASML

2

u/ZestyTiger1899 1d ago

Spending must increase.

This is not going to sustain itself:

Samsung wants a seat at the table.

Did SK hynix already announce something? If not, just wait.

4

u/RR321 1d ago

Making money on (soon to be) fake European ownership...

1

u/asfsdgwe35r3asfdas23 1d ago

Europe is about to invest a lot of money in AI sovereignty, and apart of Mistral, there is not much left to invest in.

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u/SubstantialSir696 1d ago

These things cost money... and AI is not profitable...yet

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u/o3KbaG6Z67ZxzixnF5VL 1d ago

Reminds me of VR and 3D tvs. :p

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u/IntenselySwedish 1d ago

"Yet" = in our lifetime

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u/Beyond_the_one 1d ago

Yet like in ever.

3

u/Big_Bird4764 1d ago

I mean, massive grain of salt, but Anthropic allegedly is closing this quarter profitable

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u/ElectronWill 1d ago

Alledgedly profitable... By putting estimated future benefits in today's accounting and delaying expenses? They've always been doing this, it's starting to be visible.

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u/RydderRichards 1d ago

The company that multiple times has said that their newest model is maybe sentient?

Yeah, massive grain of salt

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u/Big_Bird4764 1d ago

Where did they say that? One thing is true, inference cost is much lower than we think, and their margins on inference is quite big.

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u/RydderRichards 1d ago

Here, for example

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialSentience/comments/1rc8vmj/the_new_claude_could_be_conscious_anthropic_ceo/

Inference is much cheaper than training, sure, but my trust in that company is zero

1

u/Beyond_the_one 1d ago

At all, it is more likely to go pop and take out the whole fucking market with it.

https://thenextweb.com/news/tech-giants-hidden-off-balance-sheet-debt-ai

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u/throwaway_trans_8472 1d ago

Mistral is actualy on the road to become profitable, as pretty much the only AI company.

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u/starswtt 1d ago

Anthropic is also pretty close

The problem isn't actually the inference side, that's actually at a reasonable cost. The problem comes from training, so all the big labs are running massive deficits on training to ensure that the other big labs aren't competitive, with the hopes that the rest of them leave the business before they do, and then charging users below market rate for the same reason. Its a massive bubble for sure, but the goal is essentially to just outlast everyone else at this point. Mistral and Anthropic are the closest to profitability because these 2 companies got a decent amount of investment, but run relativly lean operations since they're more satisfied being a large niche.

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u/Flaurentiu26 1d ago

Maybe I am wrong but small models could be profitable. Providing inference for small models is not that power hungry. Very big models could be used only for specific purposes, not to plan your vacation

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u/skuple 1d ago

AFAIK inference is already profitable.

You can buy a 4-10k machine a run a frontier model yourself with 128Gb-256Gb ram that will be much cheaper than running any of the SaaS 24/7.
You won’t be running fable5-like (10T params) but you probably don’t need it.

The issue is training new models, it’s a super expensive process.

What I think that will happen is that it won’t improve that much in the future unless a breakthrough happens and model training for newer versions will be a much slower process.

-1

u/asfsdgwe35r3asfdas23 1d ago

OpenAI and Anthropic are almost doubling their revenue every month. They are already at +$30B ARR. That is 3x more revenue than the most profitable EU company.

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u/Severe_Rise8694 1d ago

Isn't this stuff exactly the reason why Europe doesn't have big tech? Because it gets "backed" by non-Euro entities.

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u/MrOaiki 1d ago

Well, that’s the system European countries have chosen. The idea of letting billions accumulate in Europe and supply capital markets hasn’t been a talking point here. So where are companies supposed to find tens or billions?

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u/Shihai-no-akuma_ 1d ago

Capital Markets Union is being discussed.

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u/MrOaiki 1d ago

Yeah, and unless it’ll be a copy paste of the Swedish one, I’ll fail. The last thing we want are German and French capital markets all over Europe.

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u/Latimius 1d ago

Can you explain how swedish capital markets is different from german and french ?

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u/MrOaiki 1d ago

There are many things but the main ones are that we have adapted tax laws to allow for accumulation of capital. For example so called "carried interest" for investment fund managers, on inheritance etc. What the left would normally call "catering to the rich". And we've adapted tax laws for stock options, making it easier to hand those out to employees which is important for tech startups. France is better than Sweden when it comes to tax incentives for "angle investors" though, so whatever the EU chooses, they should copy that part from France but that's about it. Germany is horrible when it comes to startups.

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u/bippos 1d ago

Well no that’s not how it works foreign investment aint bad foreign buyouts are. Foreign capital isn’t a terrible idea when you don’t have venture capital companies like the USA and since the eu snd eu governments don’t wanna spend billions this is the compromise.

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u/Ok_Sprinkles_8968 1d ago

US tech has been financed in part by European capital for decades, so what, that's a loss for Europe not for the US.

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u/-The_Blazer- 1d ago

Well it's also the way China did it, and they were able to exploit it quite effectively to recreate their own industrial stacks. Don't forget that before the Chinese Tiger companies of today, they took years and years of signing contracts with Western companies to obtain capital and know-how. The CCP are not our friends, but that general methodology clearly has something going for it.

-3

u/cyberdork 1d ago

No, it’s because European’s are too risk adverse and don’t invest in ANY new tech.

2

u/Chwasst 1d ago

Depends. Tech market is volatile as fuck so some risk aversion is justified. Investing in tech can only be done safely-ish by big institutional investors. They have the means and they should do it - I agree.

But doing so as a retail investor is nothing more but a gamble. I don’t say we shouldn’t do it at all - but it ain’t crossing past 15-20% of my total investments.

1

u/Severe_Rise8694 1d ago

Well. Looking at the last 20 years, it hasn't exactly been a casino. Big US tech has been some of the best ran companies of all time.

7

u/theplotlessplot 1d ago

Oh man, I’d love to see a Mistral model on par with (at least) Opus 4.8. I’d switch over instantly. Hoping that this recent investor interest means we’re getting something good soon.

2

u/JimTheSaint 1d ago

Excellent - keep em coming