For Samsung, a stake would tie down a long-term chip customer amid a global shortage — but the talks are unconfirmed, and any deal would need EU antitrust clearance.

Samsung is negotiating to put roughly €1 billion into Mistral, a stake that could set a price of about €20 billion on the French artificial-intelligence company. The sum would form one piece of an approximately €3 billion Series D round Mistral is working to raise, with EQT's Scaleup Europe Fund exploring whether to lead or co-lead it.

A €20 billion price would be close to twice the roughly €11.7 billion Mistral carried some ten months before. That earlier figure followed a €1.7 billion Series C that wrapped up in September, a round led by ASML — the Netherlands-based chipmaking-equipment maker that emerged as Mistral's largest shareholder.

Both sides have reasons beyond the money. Samsung is among only a handful of makers that can turn out high-bandwidth memory and advanced logic chips at scale, and at present buyers want more of them than are available; a holding in Mistral would tie down a long-term customer amid a worldwide chip shortage that has manufacturers racing to lift output. For Mistral, the arrangement would help lock in dependable supplies of cutting-edge chips.

The talks fit a broader move by chipmakers into AI developers. AMD is prepared to put nearly $5 billion into Anthropic, and Micron, the US memory-chip company, made a strategic investment in the same firm in June. They also match Europe's push to lean less on American AI suppliers: curbs imposed by the Trump administration a month earlier narrowed access to Anthropic's Mythos and Fable technologies, prompting companies to give homegrown options a harder look.

Even at €20 billion, Mistral — founded in Paris in 2023 and known for open-source large language models that users can download and run themselves — would sit far beneath its US rivals. Anthropic recently closed a $65 billion Series H that set its post-money worth at $965 billion, a month after OpenAI raised $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation.

The discussions, first reported earlier in the week, are not settled, and neither Samsung nor Mistral has commented publicly. Any Samsung holding would also have to clear the EU's competition scrutiny.