With investments of these huge amounts (similar to Anthropic's recent investment), do they actually get a full 1.7B€ deposited into their bank account? Or does it work in some other way?
I truly do not see the USP for Mistral other than being based in EU. It's former USP of setting up their models on-premises for clients is now moot with the proliferation of open frontier models. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see a path forward for Mistral at this point, given how far they're behind and their overall lack of competitive advantages for an AI Lab like access to hardware, cheap energy or a mass of AI talent.
Being based in Europa is a massive USP for European companies - the USA being harder and harder to trust each day. It's difficult to build business on shaky ground.
Mistral being in the EU is a feature. A lot of European companies/organizations are hesitant to use US/Chinese LLMs because of privacy reasons. For instance, the university my wife is working at are evaluating using Mistral as their default (and only reimbursed) LLM.
One or two years ago, an US solution would be completely acceptable (with promises to comply with the GDPR). But a lot of damage has been done the last 9 months or so.
Every. Single. Time. a Mistral story hits the front page, a variation of this exact comment is posted. And every single time it is corrected. It almost feels like intentional misinformation.
To repeat for the millionth time unique offerings for Mistral:
- some of the best edge models.
- some of the most cost effective in terms of cost per performance medium size models.
- unique small language models.
- unique OCR offering.
And also, being based in the EU is a HUGE advantage for any non-US company. The only thing predictable about doing business is that it's not predictable. At any moment you could get a shakedown, or just be cut off from US technology. It's a huge business risk.
I don’t really get why ASML is putting money into Mistral AI. ASML is specialized in lithography machines. Mistral, on the other hand, is yet another LLM startup.
What’s the actual synergy here? The closest angle I can imagine is that AI workloads drive demand for more chips, but I believe ASML is already selling everything it can make.
I also believe Trump has a big part of this. Exporting will be less profitable. So business will rather invest in EU than in an American AI company. This to increase local demand for their hardware.
truly. if a company can’t find a way to reinvest money in its core business, it should return it to stockholders (or worse case, invest it in public markets) rather than trying to become a stock picker for a different industry.
it speaks to the likely regulatory overheads in returning money to investors that they choose this route
Maybe it is about defending their business by going vertical? Others are too, right? Like OpenAI is partnering with Broadcom. Google and Amazon have their own chips. Nvidia will probably need to do more than build AI training chips as well.
Mistral needs a looooooot of GPUs. GPUs are made by Nvidia. Nvidia asks TSMC to make more. TSMC needs new lines to produce. TSMC acquires more machines to make new lines. TSMC buys from the only monopoly that has those machines. ASML. Now ASML happy, each machine costs 100s of millions, ASML makes back money.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. ASML is a highly strategically important company which results in secrecy, and a highly scrutinized and strictly controlled freedom to operate. They basically can't take a toilet break without clearing it with their NATO overlords first.
Mistral is about the only credible EU contender in the LLM space, and has been not just vocal but also in its actions very much in favor of transparancy and openness.
It's rather ridiculous to think that the world really wants to stick all its eggs in an American basket. Individual companies will pick whatever works best for them but I think the governments will be delighted to avoid a dependency like that.
Good news! ASML has a very strategic position. We are essentially all downstream of this one company.
Personally I see this investment as much more political than technical. ASML wants to be a real 'European' champion; not just Dutch. The Dutch and German government are on board; now the French are too.
I'm quite surprised that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic appear to have done a similar deal. Their inference is slow in comparison - like 5.10x slower than what Cerebras can achieve.
Google have their own TPUs which seem to be giving them a performance edge. Google AI mode is lightning fast in comparison to GPT-5 Thinking search for result equality that looks to be in the same ballpark.
... that said, on reading the linked press release there's actually no mention of model performance at all:
> a long-term collaboration agreement to explore the use of AI models across ASML’s product portfolio as well as research, development and operations, to benefit ASML customers with faster time to market and higher performance holistic lithography systems.
They make the machines that make the chips that power the AI revolution; which is generating a lot of demand for chips and their machines. So there's some synergy there. And Mistral based in the EU, they might be interested in sourcing their chips locally, which would require investments in new Chip factories that presumably would need machines from ASML.
There is quite a bit of semi conductor business here in Europe. Nothing glamorous like Nvidia. But there is quite a bit of know how that is one of the reasons why ASML is based in the Netherlands instead of somewhere in the US. ARM is a British company (well Japanese owned but based in the UK).
So, I can see the connection here. And it might not be a bad investment although maybe a bit of a risky one. This investment fits the broader EU strategy to be investing in chip manufacturing and AI hardware. Which benefits ASML. So, it makes sense to invest in some of the companies creating that demand. Like Mistral.
Everyone is so negative here but we have reached the limit of AI scaling with conventional methods. Who knows Mistral might find the next big breakthrough like DeepSeek did. We should be optimistic.
I am not a ML person but as per the broad level understanding the innovation was about efficient training method and training the model in much cheaper than the US models and it was dubbed as the "Sputnik moment".
> It’s hard to believe that Mistral isn’t the right choice to invest €1.7B in for economic reasons.
Why? Cursor, essentially a VSCode fork, is valued at $10B. Perplexity AI, which, as far as I'm informed, doesn't have its own foundational models, boasts a market capitalisation of $20B, according to recent news. Yet Mistral sits at just a $14B.
Meanwhile, Mistral was at the forefront of the LLM take-off, developing foundational (very lean, performant and innovative at the time) models from scratch and releasing them openly. They set up an API service, integrated with businesses, building custom models and fine-tunes, and secured partnership agreements. They launched user-facing interface and mobile app which are on par with leading companies, kept pace with "reasoning" and "research" advancements; and, in short, built a solid, commercially viable portfolio. So why on earth should Mistral AI be valued lower? Let alone have its mere €1.7B investment questioned.
Edit: Apologies, I misread your quote and missed the "isn't" part.
i recall them being one of the first ones to release a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model [1], which was quite novel at the time. post that, it has appeared to be a catch-up game for them in mainstream utility. like just a week go they announced support for custom MCP connectors to their chat offering [2].
more competition is always nice, but i wonder what can these two companies, separated by several steps in the supply chain, really achieve together.
I don't get it. "The collaboration between Mistral AI and ASML aims to generate clear benefits for ASML customers through innovative products and solutions enabled by AI, and will offer potential for joint research to address future opportunities" - so the idea is that ASML customers can somehow make use of Mistral AI?
Funny how they are investing in AI, yet the actual use of AI is lagging VERRRRYYY much behind other tech companies. Probably 2+ years behind in adoption of AI tooling.
So they have their work cut out for them when it comes to figuring out how to get their paranoid security team to enable teams to use the tools they just invested 1.7b in.
I don't see any way, shape or form in which ASML needs Mistral. If they are interested in AI-based chip design, they should either partner with a leading provider or keep their cards open for buying a startup that focuses on that specifically. Mistral is not even a leader on the segment they specialize in (open-source LLMs).
I hope they also get to use the new JUPITER supercomputer in Germany which was built, among other things, to strengthen the AI aspirations and self-sufficiency of Europe.
ASML CEO: Mistral investment not aimed at strategic autonomy for Europe
"In the long run, all AI models will be similar. It's about how you use the models in a well-protected environment. We will never allow our data and that of our customers to leave ASML. So a partner must be willing to work with us and adapt its model to our needs. Not only did Mistral want to do that, it is also their business model."
“A good reason to collaborate.” That's how ASML's CEO described his company's remarkable €1.3 billion investment in French AI company Mistral on Wednesday. Since the investment was leaked by Reuters on Sunday, there has been much speculation about ASML's reasons for investing in the European challenger to giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Analysts and commentators pointed to the geopolitical implications or the strong French link between the companies. But according to ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet, the reason was purely business. “Sovereignty has never been the goal.”
Mistral AI is a start-up founded in 2023 that specializes in building large language models. The French CEO of ASML and Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch met at an AI summit in Paris earlier this year and decided to work together to use Mistral's models to further improve ASML's chip machines.
Surprising investment
Each ASML machine generates approximately 1 terabyte of data per day. “Our machines are very complex,” Fouquet explains in an interview with the FD. "We have highly advanced control systems on our machines to enable them to operate very quickly and with great accuracy. The amount of data our machines generate gives us the opportunity to use AI. With the current software and machine learning models, we are limited in what we can do with the data and how quickly we can adjust the machine,“ says the CEO. ”AI is the next step in making better use of all that data."
ASML has invested in other companies in the past, such as German lens manufacturer Zeiss and Eindhoven-based photonics company Smart Photonics, but those were either suppliers or potential customers. Mistral is neither.
Running AI models in-house
According to the ASML CEO, the Dutch company's investment in Mistral stems from the conviction that both companies can create value together. If Mistral becomes more valuable as a result of the collaboration, ASML can benefit from that.
ASML is the main investor in a new €1.7 billion financing round for Mistral. This makes Mistral an important AI player in Europe, but small compared to its American rivals. OpenAI raised $40 billion in its latest round alone. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude program, which is popular among programmers, just closed a $13 billion round.
“European sovereignty was not the goal”
According to Fouquet, the reason for the collaboration lies primarily in the way Mistral develops its AI models. “In the long run, all AI models will be similar. It's about how you use the models in a well-protected environment,” says Fouquet. “We will never allow our data and that of our customers to leave ASML. So a partner must be willing to work with us and adapt its model to our needs. Not only did Mistral want to do that, it is also their business model.”
According to Fouquet, the collaboration is not motivated by a desire for greater European sovereignty. “That was not the goal. But if it contributes to that, we are happy,” says Fouquet.
ASML supports EU initiatives to strengthen the chip sector in Europe, but always maintains a politically neutral stance in the geopolitical struggle between the United States, China, and the European Union. This is understandable, as the company has major customers in all regions, such as TS...
Market is super frothy and we’ve reached a plateau of what this tech can do right now. Unless someone comes forth with a true step change enhancement things gonna get messy soon.
The current pace of meh models releases and everyone converging on the same quality of tech can’t sustain the number of players and valuations out there. Not even close. Even the AI grifters on LinkedIn are running out of grifting steam.
> The collaboration between Mistral AI and ASML aims to generate clear benefits for ASML customers through innovative products and solutions enabled by AI
I don’t know much about lithography which is why I ask - what is an AI supposed to do in a lithography machine? Does anyone know?
Maybe it has to do with the "place and route" step in the synthesis of a chip design. Right now it is based mainly on random numbers and shuffling logic and wires. ML(not LLM) could help here in the same way as AlphaFold is using it for proteins.
> I don’t know much about lithography which is why I ask - what is an AI supposed to do in a lithography machine? Does anyone know?
Not in the lithography machines probably, but more likely in surrounding equipment and in the business itself.
Some ideas:
* Augment metrology division with a trained model for analysis of the (enormous!) amounts of wafer measurement data
* An extra layer of error detection and possibly correction at all sorts of levels, from wafer alignment on the wafer stage to pre analysis of recipes that are about to be run.
* Something that cleverly digs through the pile of log messages and reports on impending issues that haven't manifested themselves yet in terms of yield loss
* Ideally, deep code analysis to find performance, Cpu or memory issues in the ASML codebase that a human hasn't detected yet because the code base is just too huge. (An engineer usually gets only access to a small part of the codebase, and none - not even read access - to other parts.)
* Dig through the ticketing system (another place where you could easily drown in information overload) to find relationships between tickets, mark potential duplicates and notify of bugs instructing a critical path.
* And of course, replace the first line personnel in the outsourced IT support departments. PC not working? Talk to the LLM first (instead of calling someone), and it'll triage and dispatch
60 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 74.1 ms ] threadOne or two years ago, an US solution would be completely acceptable (with promises to comply with the GDPR). But a lot of damage has been done the last 9 months or so.
To repeat for the millionth time unique offerings for Mistral:
- some of the best edge models.
- some of the most cost effective in terms of cost per performance medium size models.
- unique small language models.
- unique OCR offering.
And also, being based in the EU is a HUGE advantage for any non-US company. The only thing predictable about doing business is that it's not predictable. At any moment you could get a shakedown, or just be cut off from US technology. It's a huge business risk.
What’s the actual synergy here? The closest angle I can imagine is that AI workloads drive demand for more chips, but I believe ASML is already selling everything it can make.
it speaks to the likely regulatory overheads in returning money to investors that they choose this route
Everybody in that space does it, or at least tries to.
Mistral is about the only credible EU contender in the LLM space, and has been not just vocal but also in its actions very much in favor of transparancy and openness.
Interesting how these two cultures will collide.
[edit: nevermind, I speculated before reading the announcement. Reality is much more boring than that]
Personally I see this investment as much more political than technical. ASML wants to be a real 'European' champion; not just Dutch. The Dutch and German government are on board; now the French are too.
See also: new CEO is French.
Mistral previously partnered with Cerebras on Le Chat: https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/mistral-le-chat
I'm quite surprised that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic appear to have done a similar deal. Their inference is slow in comparison - like 5.10x slower than what Cerebras can achieve.
Google have their own TPUs which seem to be giving them a performance edge. Google AI mode is lightning fast in comparison to GPT-5 Thinking search for result equality that looks to be in the same ballpark.
... that said, on reading the linked press release there's actually no mention of model performance at all:
> a long-term collaboration agreement to explore the use of AI models across ASML’s product portfolio as well as research, development and operations, to benefit ASML customers with faster time to market and higher performance holistic lithography systems.
Google is a search engine but there's also Google Ventures that does investments [0] into loads of different companies.
I'm really not sure why (in all these threads) people try to put Europe's biggest tech company into a single box when most big companies aren't.
[0] https://www.gv.com/portfolio
There is quite a bit of semi conductor business here in Europe. Nothing glamorous like Nvidia. But there is quite a bit of know how that is one of the reasons why ASML is based in the Netherlands instead of somewhere in the US. ARM is a British company (well Japanese owned but based in the UK).
So, I can see the connection here. And it might not be a bad investment although maybe a bit of a risky one. This investment fits the broader EU strategy to be investing in chip manufacturing and AI hardware. Which benefits ASML. So, it makes sense to invest in some of the companies creating that demand. Like Mistral.
Why? Cursor, essentially a VSCode fork, is valued at $10B. Perplexity AI, which, as far as I'm informed, doesn't have its own foundational models, boasts a market capitalisation of $20B, according to recent news. Yet Mistral sits at just a $14B.
Meanwhile, Mistral was at the forefront of the LLM take-off, developing foundational (very lean, performant and innovative at the time) models from scratch and releasing them openly. They set up an API service, integrated with businesses, building custom models and fine-tunes, and secured partnership agreements. They launched user-facing interface and mobile app which are on par with leading companies, kept pace with "reasoning" and "research" advancements; and, in short, built a solid, commercially viable portfolio. So why on earth should Mistral AI be valued lower? Let alone have its mere €1.7B investment questioned.
Edit: Apologies, I misread your quote and missed the "isn't" part.
more competition is always nice, but i wonder what can these two companies, separated by several steps in the supply chain, really achieve together.
[1] https://mistral.ai/news/mixtral-of-experts [2] https://mistral.ai/news/le-chat-mcp-connectors-memories
Funny how they are investing in AI, yet the actual use of AI is lagging VERRRRYYY much behind other tech companies. Probably 2+ years behind in adoption of AI tooling.
So they have their work cut out for them when it comes to figuring out how to get their paranoid security team to enable teams to use the tools they just invested 1.7b in.
Maybe the best tech news of the year IMHO.
"In the long run, all AI models will be similar. It's about how you use the models in a well-protected environment. We will never allow our data and that of our customers to leave ASML. So a partner must be willing to work with us and adapt its model to our needs. Not only did Mistral want to do that, it is also their business model."
https://fd.nl/bedrijfsleven/1569378/asml-ceo-strategische-au...
--
Full article translated:
“A good reason to collaborate.” That's how ASML's CEO described his company's remarkable €1.3 billion investment in French AI company Mistral on Wednesday. Since the investment was leaked by Reuters on Sunday, there has been much speculation about ASML's reasons for investing in the European challenger to giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Analysts and commentators pointed to the geopolitical implications or the strong French link between the companies. But according to ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet, the reason was purely business. “Sovereignty has never been the goal.”
Mistral AI is a start-up founded in 2023 that specializes in building large language models. The French CEO of ASML and Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch met at an AI summit in Paris earlier this year and decided to work together to use Mistral's models to further improve ASML's chip machines.
Surprising investment
Each ASML machine generates approximately 1 terabyte of data per day. “Our machines are very complex,” Fouquet explains in an interview with the FD. "We have highly advanced control systems on our machines to enable them to operate very quickly and with great accuracy. The amount of data our machines generate gives us the opportunity to use AI. With the current software and machine learning models, we are limited in what we can do with the data and how quickly we can adjust the machine,“ says the CEO. ”AI is the next step in making better use of all that data."
ASML has invested in other companies in the past, such as German lens manufacturer Zeiss and Eindhoven-based photonics company Smart Photonics, but those were either suppliers or potential customers. Mistral is neither.
Running AI models in-house
According to the ASML CEO, the Dutch company's investment in Mistral stems from the conviction that both companies can create value together. If Mistral becomes more valuable as a result of the collaboration, ASML can benefit from that.
ASML is the main investor in a new €1.7 billion financing round for Mistral. This makes Mistral an important AI player in Europe, but small compared to its American rivals. OpenAI raised $40 billion in its latest round alone. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude program, which is popular among programmers, just closed a $13 billion round.
“European sovereignty was not the goal”
According to Fouquet, the reason for the collaboration lies primarily in the way Mistral develops its AI models. “In the long run, all AI models will be similar. It's about how you use the models in a well-protected environment,” says Fouquet. “We will never allow our data and that of our customers to leave ASML. So a partner must be willing to work with us and adapt its model to our needs. Not only did Mistral want to do that, it is also their business model.”
According to Fouquet, the collaboration is not motivated by a desire for greater European sovereignty. “That was not the goal. But if it contributes to that, we are happy,” says Fouquet.
ASML supports EU initiatives to strengthen the chip sector in Europe, but always maintains a politically neutral stance in the geopolitical struggle between the United States, China, and the European Union. This is understandable, as the company has major customers in all regions, such as TS...
The current pace of meh models releases and everyone converging on the same quality of tech can’t sustain the number of players and valuations out there. Not even close. Even the AI grifters on LinkedIn are running out of grifting steam.
I don’t know much about lithography which is why I ask - what is an AI supposed to do in a lithography machine? Does anyone know?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_and_route
Not in the lithography machines probably, but more likely in surrounding equipment and in the business itself.
Some ideas:
* Augment metrology division with a trained model for analysis of the (enormous!) amounts of wafer measurement data
* An extra layer of error detection and possibly correction at all sorts of levels, from wafer alignment on the wafer stage to pre analysis of recipes that are about to be run.
* Something that cleverly digs through the pile of log messages and reports on impending issues that haven't manifested themselves yet in terms of yield loss
* Ideally, deep code analysis to find performance, Cpu or memory issues in the ASML codebase that a human hasn't detected yet because the code base is just too huge. (An engineer usually gets only access to a small part of the codebase, and none - not even read access - to other parts.)
* Dig through the ticketing system (another place where you could easily drown in information overload) to find relationships between tickets, mark potential duplicates and notify of bugs instructing a critical path.
* And of course, replace the first line personnel in the outsourced IT support departments. PC not working? Talk to the LLM first (instead of calling someone), and it'll triage and dispatch
This is all assuming happy flow of course