Samsung Invests in Mistral as Europe Expands Sovereign AI

Samsung is in talks to invest up to about €1 billion in French AI start-up Mistral, part of a funding round that could value the company around €20 billion, with EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund among potential backers. Microsoft has announced a multibillion-dollar expansion of its partnership with Mistral, adding European GPU capacity and integrating Mistral’s Medium 3.5 and OCR 4 models into Foundry and Copilot Studio, while enabling Azure Local deployments to preserve data sovereignty. The deals underscore Europe’s push for sovereign AI infrastructure and give customers regulatory-friendly options beyond U.S. models, aligning with Microsoft’s European Digital Commitments. Mistral is expanding its European GPU capacity, deploying thousands of Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs to support training, inference, and large-scale deployments across regulated environments. Together, the partnerships reflect a shift toward plural model providers and sovereign cloud options, even as Microsoft maintains collaboration with OpenAI for some services. The fundraising round for Mistral around €3 billion reinforces Europe’s ambitions to build independent AI capabilities without ceding strategic control.