Samsung backs Mistral in record-breaking €3 billion funding round as French AI firm targets sovereign AI gains | IT Pro

摘要: Samsung backs Mistral in record-breaking €3 billion funding round as French AI firm targets sovereign AI gains

The French AI company breaks European

正文

Samsung backs Mistral in record-breaking €3 billion funding round as French AI firm targets sovereign AI gains

The French AI company breaks European records, but still trails American rivals with a €21bn valuation

Nicole Kobie

Published

8 September 2026

3 min read

(Image credit: Getty Images)

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French AI giant Mistral has raised €3 billion to support frontier model research and development of sovereign,

open-weight systems

.

The funding, led by Samsung Electronics and Scaleup Europe Fund, is the largest equity round by a European tech company and values Mistral at €21 billion.

The aim is to train "bigger and faster models", CEO Arthur Mensch told

, but Mistral also said in a blog post that its focus was

open-weight models

built and run in Europe that allow companies to keep hold of their data.

"During the first wave of generative AI, the central question was who could build the most powerful model," the company said in a blog post.

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"Organizations and governments are now asking a different one: how to harness the power of AI for their mission-critical needs without surrendering control over the infrastructure and intelligence loop."

Mistral added that demand for a “combination of performance and control, choice, and independence” is growing globally.

The company said enterprises are governments alike are now weighing up long-term tech dependencies, governance requirements and “deployment choices that come with any AI investment”.

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