Mistral AI raises 1.7B€, enters strategic partnership with ASML

I dunno if ASML is lacking any political favor that Mistral can give them, they are already one of the most critical companies for Europe and the entire western supply chain.

There is a possibility this is a step towards building a full-stack all-EU AI - if AI delivers on the hype, the EU will certainly want to have one they fully control without dependency on either the US or China. But this would mean having an EU-based alternative to both TSMC and NVIDIA as well, and it's hard to see how that happens. It probably looks something like the EU passing its own CHIPS act to open TSMC-run fabs on EU soil, making Nvidia chips that are then allocated to Mistral; there is non-EU IP there but the whole operation can at least take place on EU soil.

Never underestimate Europe’s ability to destroy innovation.

Woah woah woah

AMD promises ROCm will stop being a joke very soon! Maybe this year even!

Everything is wrapper copper, iron, salt, and water

ASML in turn wraps a bunch of companies for lenses (Carl Zeiss), lasers (Trumpf), etc [0]

Given lenses and microchips are both made from sand, I'm gonna conspiracy theory that LLMs were invented by sand companies to sell more sand.

[0] https://www.robotsops.com/complete-list-of-all-suppliers-and...

> but we have reached the limit of AI scaling with conventional methods

We've just only started RL training LLMs. So far, RL has not used more than 10-20% of the existing pre-training compute budget. There's a lot of scaling left in RL training yet.

I would make a wild guess that this is a policital invesment. It's hard to believe Mistral is the right choice to throw in 1.7B€ for economic reason.

This move is mostly about expected EU subsidies

what next big breakthrough are you claiming deepseek found? MLA? GRPO? these are all small tweaks

Especially with Euclyd entering the space (efficiency for AI workloads), with founders with tight ties to ASML, this is the move Europe needs.

Past Mistral investors: JC Decaux (urban advertizing), CMA CGM CEO (maritime logistics), Iliad CEO (Internet service provider), Salesforce (client relation management), Samsung (electronics), Cisco (network hardware), NVIDIA (chips designer)[0]. I agree ASML is a surprising choice, but I guess investments are not necessarily directly connected to the company purpose.

BTW, I generated that list by asking my default search engine, which is Mistral Le Chat: indeed, using Cerebras chips, the responses are so fast that it became competitive with asking Google Search. A lot of comments claim it is worse, but in my experience it is the fastest, and for all but very advanced mathematical questions, it has similar quality to its best competitors. Even LMArena’s Elo indicates it wins 46% of the time against ChatGPT.

[0]: https://mistral.ai/fr/news/mistral-ai-raises-1-7-b-to-accele...

Quite complex algorithms are used to compensate and tune for pattern clarity and focus in high end semiconductor production.

Its a field that has used neutral networks before. (As people pushed down the size pre-EUV, apparently alot of wierd techniques were layered to produce features at or smaller than the wavelength)

But mistral just makes llms. There is no reason to believe experts in llm would be at all competent at quantom scale physics simulation and prediction.

It feels more logical to invest on the existing researchers and companies in the nanotechnology design field to adapt newer AI techniques.

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

The most strategic move ASML can make is change its licensing structure such that Apple will have to pay 30% of their revenue for using their Fab platform.

While I associate Mistral with LLMs, the electric design automation software used for planning and designing chips already uses machine learning/reinforcement learning for some approaches. AI could play an even greater role in chip design in the future.

AI is being used more and more in chip design

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.

They’ve built performance, enterprise utility, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnerships into their core story. It's quite a list. The models are opensource, Voxtral outperforms Whisper in terms of accuracy.

There is no AI company like Mistral.

1. What you say can be applied to literally everybody. Literally. What is the USP of "insert literally any other company"?

2. FWIW as a business consumer of multiple APIs, Mistral models are absolutely excellent/fast/cheap compared to other offerings. The only real competitors they have is Google from all of our research. And we'd rather give money to Mistral.

3. Being EU-based is a strong USP as the 2020s are proving.

4. France has cheap energy and lots of AI talent. In fact, I would even argue that while american companies need to fight each other for the very same talent Mistral can get plenty of it just by being EU based. Believe it or not, most Europeans really don't want to live in the US and would rather make very high salaries here rather than extremely high salaries in US.

This would be great for us! We are building an AI agent tool and the biggest questions we get from potential customers are about the privacy issue of using non-EU providers. So having an actually good EU model would be perfect for us.

While I tend to agree, the other players (Anthropic, OAI, Google) don't have super unique USPs compared to one another, either. Just to be fair.

France has some of the best computer scientists in the world. Cheap energy. Rule of law and is overall an extremely desirable place to live.

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.

Do they really need to be anything more than the best European option to be successful?

Eventually with all technology you realise we need regional localised players who can cater to the regulations and nuances of those markets. Yes we'll continue to have global providers of AI technology like OpenAI but it's vitally important to have local players which over time might just offer a better experience to the EU or wherever else. We cannot be continually dependent on the US for everything. This also means we're not going to see it at the scale of revenue and valuations or fundraising as the US and thats ok. It's important not to try play the same game e.g burning all the funding on GPUs and high compensation. Spotify, Adyen, etc have proven their worth starting in the EU. Even in the UK there are specific companies that cater to banking, ride hailing, etc and we need to keep some of that tech local. I think this also goes down to the infrastructure level of technology, cloud and AI which we haven't done enough of. And maybe even mobile and AR glasses.

1.7B should pull Mistral (and Europe) out of the little fish pond if they hadnt left already. I hope they succeed.

Exactly; and hopefully all the while trying to reach higher standards across all axes.

ASML is geopolitically relevant. If they want to offer dependable LLM-based solutions (even side products, like agents that help with their products) to their customers, they have to pick what partners to base their offering on.

Choosing something from US or China would add an external factor that could pull the rug at unexpected times. Mistral is safer for ASML because it has almost the same geopolitical constraints and stakeholders as they do.

maybe i'm too cynical but to me this looks more like an orchestrated "win" story for the eu ecosystem with some backroom dealing/incentives and some ex-post rationalisation sprinkled on rather than a strategic invest by asml.

"will offer potential for joint research to address future opportunities" seems like the meat of that statement. I read that like they're (potentially) starting to investigate building chips for inference, with Mistral probably leading all the software parts, ASML handling the hardware.

Computational lithography.... apparently.

It looks like a specialized proprietary application to identify defect patterns in lithography, similar to these papers:

https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/calibre/2024/04/03/ai-ml-rules-...

That seems to be one of the legitimate uses of "AI", as opposed to the generative nonsense. It also makes sense that the company is in the EU. Companies there tend to focus on real things as opposed to hot air. It also means that one cannot evaluate Mistral by focusing on its chatbot performance, since the real business seems elsewhere.

ASML not only sells the machines that makes chips (or analyses them like Yieldstar) but also makes software that customers use to work with the machine's - whether that is for designing, tweaking or analyzing chips.

AI helps designing tools for better machines?

Lol I thought that Mistral would collaborate on a fab for AI accelerators, this is some Microsoft Copilot tier nonsense.

But they do, because plenty of people are willing to move, especially if the compensation is good.

Caveat, my point of view is limited/blinkered, I've worked with a lot of expats / european migrants but I do think they're the more adventurous types who don't want to settle down somewhere yet. Happy to live in an apartment for a few years and take in the culture type of people.

> would benefit from the talent pool of all EU

I get what you are saying, but one of the core benefits of the EU is the freedom of movement and residence so I don't think not having a remote work policy is disqualifying them from being an EU AI company.

So by that logic: Google is not an US AI company, since they have the same rules, requiring ppl to come into offices?

There is enough talent willing to work there as there is no competition for them

And have half the workers take 4 hour work days with 60 days of PTO while workers in the US work 10 hour days with no vacations? Maybe there's a reason EU is so far behind and the only way for Mistral to compete is to change that.

Anthropic has much more funding than that. Most recent one was at $13B at the one before was at $3.5B. Now imagine that GPT recieved $40B in one round!

I'm also wondering this. It also doesn't seem to be a coincidence, that ASML is an integral part of the semiconductor value chain.

It works whatever way is agreed upon between them and the investors. For such large amounts it’s unlikely to be pure cash (there’s likely some amount of services somewhere in there), and they won’t be calling for all that cash at once.

The cash that is guaranteed is sent as soon as the investee needs it (they do what is called a capital call). Early stage startups and investments just do one capital call for the full amount, but larger amounts are often committed for periods of time; this also helps the investors schedule their own cash flow: for example if I have 500m this year and 500m next year, I can invest 1b in you, given the right schedule.

ASML is Europes most important tech company so this is for sure also a political move.

I think you got it the wrong way. The partnership is about using Mistral’s AI in ASML’s processes, not sell photolithography equipment to Mistral.

ASML is not a maker of AI chips directly, no, but its photolithography equipment is essential for producing chips, so there are some not-too-distant synergies to exploit, no?

Cerebras has very limited scale. Mistral has very few users so they can use cerebra’s in inference whereas OpenAI and Anthropic cannot. If mistral grows a lot they will stop using cerebras