The Dutch Connection: French AI Leader Gets Backing from European Tech Giant ASML

French AI leader Mistral isn’t settling for being le grand fromage at home. It aims to be the best on earth. That means developing AI models and data centers that can go toe to toe with the best the US and Asia have on offer.

On Tuesday, the company received key backing from a continental ally. Dutch semiconductor equipment giant ASML opened its wallet — or portemonnee, a word borrowed from the French porte-monnaie — to become Mistral’s largest shareholder.

Which Way the Mistral Blows

Paris-based Mistral is a relative newbie in the AI world, founded just two years ago; by comparison, OpenAI, at 10 years old, is practically ready for senior citizen discounts. The maker of the chatbot Le Chat has been hailed by policymakers, including French President Emmanuel Macron, as key to Europe’s ambitions of building its own tech bulwark to fend off dominant US and Asian competition. Named after a famously strong wind in southern France, Mistral is also building data centers to establish European competition against major US cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, making it a strategic bet on two fronts.

Enter ASML, one of Europe’s undisputed tech giants. Its $1.5 billion, 11% stake in the French startup announced Tuesday is a breakthrough moment in continental synergy. The fresh cash fuels Mistral’s efforts to develop new models and data centers, and ASML could hardly be a better-positioned partner. The Dutch giant has a de facto monopoly on the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines essential to making advanced semiconductors. This has placed it at the heart of the global AI boom, furthering its lucrative symbiotic relationship with chip giants like Nvidia. On Tuesday, its $316 billion market cap made it the most valuable company in the European Union, which is something Mistral can look up to:

• ASML’s stake, part of a total $2 billion round, values the French company at roughly $14 billion. That number underscores how far Mistral trails its AI competition in Silicon Valley: Anthropic closed a $13 billion funding round with a $183 billion valuation last week, while OpenAI is planning a secondary sale at a $500 billion valuation.
• Mistral has another unique backer in Macron, who has encouraged blue chip firms to do business with Mistral and positioned the company as a key beneficiary of a €109 billion ($127 billion) national AI plan. France’s state-owned investment bank Bpifrance is also among its backers, though Mistral has no shortage of prominent international investors, among them Lightspeed Ventures, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia and Microsoft. 

Double Dutch: And speaking of European companies with Microsoft ties, the US tech giant reached across the Atlantic on Monday to do business with another Netherlands-based tech firm. Nebius is a new arrival to Amsterdam, having split from Russia’s Google-equivalent Yandex last year. It ditched the search engine business of its former Russian parent to focus on AI infrastructure and computing capacity, something Microsoft has a growing need for as it builds out new products. Nebius will make at least $17.4 billion, and up to $19.4 billion, for providing Microsoft with dedicated AI computing capacity from a new data center being built not in picturesque Amsterdam or elegant Paris, but the land of gardens itself … New Jersey.