Samsung leads a €3 billion Mistral round that values the lab above €21 billion

Mistral AI said on Tuesday, 8 September, that it had raised €3 billion, about $3.5 billion, in a Series D equity round. The post-money valuation sits above €21 billion, or about $24.4 billion. Samsung Electronics led the round. The EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund and existing investor PSG Equity co-led. Mistral called the deal the largest equity fundraising ever completed by a European technology company.

A year ago the Paris lab raised €1.7 billion in Series C at a post-money valuation of €11.7 billion, with ASML in the lead and Nvidia and Andreessen Horowitz among the backers. The new figure almost doubles that mark. American names remain on the cap table. Existing investors a16z, Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures came in again. Advent and BlackRock joined. The company still works with Microsoft under a partnership expanded in July that includes Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs across European sites.

Mistral said it will spend the money on training compute, inference infrastructure, commercial growth and an international footprint. It already leases space at Eclairion’s data centre in Bruyères-le-Châtel, south of Paris. In March it raised $830 million of debt to buy 13,800 Nvidia GB300 GPUs for that site. In May it announced a deployment at Digital Realty’s Paris South campus. It is also planning a €1.2 billion data centre at EcoDataCenter’s Borlänge site in Sweden.

President Emmanuel Macron wrote on X that the round reflected a shared French and South Korean goal of building a third way in AI. South Korean President Lee Jae-myung was in France with a business delegation when the deal closed. Samsung’s entry had the blessing of French authorities. Mistral has argued that the first wave of generative systems asked who could build the most powerful model, and that governments now ask how to use the systems without giving up control of the infrastructure.

On a global scale the lab is still small. OpenAI closed a round in March with $122 billion of committed capital and a post-money valuation of $852 billion. Mistral’s models have not become mass consumer products. The company says it does not aim to build a European ChatGPT. The bet in this round is compute and contracts, not a chatbot brand.

The political content of the cheque matters as much as the size. An EU-backed scale-up fund sitting beside Samsung and a French president claiming a third way turns a private raise into a statement about where European model training will live. The next test is whether those GPUs in Bruyères-le-Châtel, Paris South and Borlänge produce models that ministries and firms will actually buy.