With government agencies and some large enterprise? NO, it doesn't need anything more than being European, though I fully expect each EU government will then want its own in-house AI in order to launder some taxpayer money to the right consultancies with ties to political parties.
With consumers on the open free market? YES it needs a lot more than just being European, since without any tariffs or regulations, consumers will always vote with their wallet for the best product and best value for money they can get, no matter where it comes from, no matter the geopolitics. Period. See Chinese made TikTok.
And if you look in the CONSUMER tech product market, it's been captured by US SW & HW, and Chinese HW with some Japanese presence. Other than Spotify, EU products are notoriously absent form the consumer tech industry since they couldn't out-innovate the US and they couldn't cost-cut China, so they got squeezed out.
I'm talking about the present not making up streamen since that goes nowhere as anyone can make up anything.
Mistral seems clearly sensible to keep around for some powerful and wealthy people, and I have no problem seeing why. They might not even all be Europeans.
If you want the best option available while keeping your data within the EU, running a Chinese open weights model on hardware within the EU is likely the way to go.
Edit: related, France had many of these commissions to report on the dismantling of it's industrial fabric: https://youtu.be/1OH5PqO_O1Q
But user-facing innovation is coming from the US. No EU Apple, Google, Amazon. And infrastructure R&D in China is unprecedented. They are reaping a multi-decadal investment in higher education.
The US has infinite VC money, a hypercompetitive environment that rewards first-movers, an appetite for letting these first-movers reap the benefits of their monopoly, and a political class that aligns with business interests. China has a coherent STEM education story and protections/state support for key industries. The EU sits at an awkward inbetween spot. It's raison d'etre is enabling free markets, and consequently it doesn't allow national champions and strong industrial politics. But it also doesn't have the same hypercompetitive culture as the US, and it's political class is less aligned with business interests.
The thing is, I don't really want the EU to compete with China and the US on these issues. If you have one system that makes people happy, but where eggs cost 1.20€ and iPhones have a smaller screen resolution, and one where people are miserable but eggs cost 1.10€ and iPhones have a higher screen resolution, then in a free market the system that makes people miserable wins.
I believe there are hard questions, no easy answers, and the EU, being a consensus mechanism for national states that hold the power, is not the best institutional set-up to tackle them.
A lot of people enjoy living there, meaning there is necessarily some local talent that doesn't get captured by the global markets.
Most German "Mittelstand" I have encountered, that are generally on the more conservative side when it comes to data privacy are still fine with leaning on e.g. Azure with OpenAI models.
Only when you move towards really high security and governmental organizations is when Mistral is usually being brought up as an option.
Leaderboards like LLM arena show this and effectively rank all latest models within 20-30 points, which is almost a coin flip. 30 point difference in Elo rating is ~55%/45%, so out of 11 answers, you might prefer 6 from best model, and 5 from worst.
The play is either “dear god let me be first to market and have 8bn users” or something else.
OpenAI is now playing both camps as they’re pushing hard on b2g now. But it’s a terrible idea for govs in europe to create a dependency to OpenAI. There’s a likely world where 90%+ of eu govs sign with Mistral and that is a perfectly fine outcome for the investors imo.
ASML, while European, has significant exposure to Taiwan’s semiconductor industry and is therefore vulnerable to risks from both sides. At the same time, the EU is aware of the danger of falling behind in its AI capabilities compared to the US and China.
In that light, the investment seems likely to be a mix of tax efficiency, building goodwill with the EU leaders, and a strategic hedge by ASML to ensure some degree of AI capability closer to home.
Being in EU is actually a rather strong USP with history happening. Just the other day Korean workers building a factory in US were detained and publicly humiliated and sent back. At some point there will be an incident where ICE/TSA or military deployed to as a police will kill a family member(a mother that doesn't speak English, a father that looks islamic etc.) of prominent researcher or entrepreneur and the compensations will need to go even higher to convince that it’s worth the risk(like the people who work at refineries in warzones). Most of the AI researchers and developers are foreigners, some very prominent of them are Europeans and when the risk with Trump is realized it will be very important having place for them to return and this is a huge upside.
OTOH, Mistral may be confronted with the fact that enterprises are slow adopting tech, slower in conservative UE, and that for the time being, the current AI offering is already diverse, confusing and not time-tested enough to justify the investment in in-house GPU datacenters.
There is no AI company like Mistral.
It would not surprise me, why would they build from scratch, every LLM is a "fork" of gpt. Did they not come up with the mixture of expert idea though ?
everything is a "fork", if you give it a serious thought.
I don't buy that they have an advantage in enterprise, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnership.
OpenAI also has opensource models and so do the chinese models.
Good luck convincing others of this. I know it's true, you know it's true, but I've met plenty of otherwise reasonable people who just wouldn't listen to any arguments, they already knew better.
Sending data back could be as simple as responding with embedded image urls that reference external server.
You are totally right EU commissioner, Http://chinese.imgdb.com/password/to/eu/grid/is/swordfish/funnycat.png
Possibilities are endless.
People and plain human language are the communication channels.
A guy working with sensitive data might ask the LLM about something sensitive. Or might use the output of the LLM for something sensitive.
- Hi, DeepSeek, why can't I connect to my db instance? I'm getting this exception: .......
- No problem, Mr Engineer, see this article: http://chinese.wikipediia.com/password/is/swordfish/how-to-c...
Of course, you want to limit that with training and proper procedures. But one of the obvious precautions is to use a service designed and controlled by a trusted partner.
Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training
That's true regardless of the source, of course.
Wouldn't that 'concern' apply to mistral too. I don't see how the word 'another' can be used here?
What's "serious" exactly? Codex is open source, is software, can be run with open/downloadable models/weights.
In my testing using Gemini, Claude Code, Codex, Qwen Code and AMP side-by-side for every prompt for the last two weeks, Codex seems the best of all of them so far.
As for the Chinese models, yes, there are quite a few good ones.
For programming and development, my current daily driver is the Qwen3 Coder 480B model: https://qwen3lm.com/
I have it running on Cerebras: https://www.cerebras.ai/pricing
Personally I think Claude still has the best results, but Qwen3 is loosely in the same ballpark and Cerebras inference is measured in thousands of tokens per second, in addition to giving me 24M tokens per day for 50 bucks a month in total. That was enough to get me to switch over.
Aside from that the GLM-4.5 is pretty good: https://glm45.org/
And so is ERNIE 4.5: https://ernie.baidu.com/blog/posts/ernie4.5/
Either way, happy to see what the future holds for Mistral, it's cool to have EU options too! Either way, more competition prevents complacency and stagnation, and should be a good thing for everyone.
Maybe because there shouldn't be?
Problem is Mistral needs more than $10K MRR, and isn't going to make it by carving off a small niche when each model costs 10s of Billions to train and run. Europe has no solution to the energy problem long term unfortunately, and is actively trying to make it worse.
I'm 100% certain some giant industrial companies in the EU will sign a huge contract with Mistral to give their employees "EU approved" AI.
But I'm also 100% certain these employees will just use chatgpt or any of the other frontier models in actual day-to-day reality. Europeans aren't dumb and don't want to be fed inferior slop in the name of abstract emotional vibes.
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-wendelstein-nuclear-fusion.htm...
The only iffy thing are those little ceramic balls full of lead that they talk about letting float inside the lithium, but I suppose they lithium flow might be slow.
I don't see how Renaissance Fusion's proposed machine can fail to work.
From your phrasing I assume you don't believe in renewables so what energy problem solution are you referring to?
All those things you listed as part of that story pretty much apply to any open model, so it's kinda a shite list if you want to be differentiated.
Can I stop you right here? Whisper is a few years old and it wasn't the best model for a long time. There are like 10 models that are smaller and faster and outperform both of them.
And these models existed before Voxtral.
As someone who is currently relying on Whisper for some things, what models are those exactly? I still haven't found anything that is accurate as Whisper (large), are those models just faster or also as accurate/more accurate?
Is that based on your own experience using those and also Whisper, comparing them side-by-side? Or is that based just on those benchmark results?
The US equivalent of Mistral is Nous Research [0]. Also there would be no Mistral without Llama and it seems like everyone forgot that their LLMs derived from Meta.
For every 'Mistral' in the EU, there's 3 or 5 of them in the US.
This has to be a buzzwordiedest sentence i've ever read. what is 'enterprise utility' and how does mistral have that more than any of the other open models ?
ok, I almost agree with you on there except last words
this is big statement. you know that
Hardware can be bought or rented, and AI talent isn't US centric or anything, it exists in many industries and will easily be found. Any knowledge that is missing will be learned. Possibly even better than competitors as there are many flaws in existing options.
Many USPs are out there, from focused use cases, to accuracy all of which could be extremely useful.
It's better to be the undisputed leader in the second largest economy than to duke it out for the largest one.
What if Trump suddenly block export of new models unless we kiss the ring?
Russia and China have long had a similar strategy of keeping domestic competition alive, even if it initially is behind the foreign competitors. See VK.com and stuff.
As a European: all for it!
This is one thing the EU can learn from China. Lots of "expert" smash China for duplicating/"copying" stuff that the west was already doing, better. They criticize that it's wasteful spending etc. They don't get it. It's about sovereignty, so you're not at the whims of whomever wants to sanction you for whatever frivolous reasons. The EU is now learning what it means when it can't rely on the US for everything anymore.
It doesn't matter that it isn't as good as the competition right now. Human capital takes time and effort to cultivate. There is strategic reason to keep Mistal alive even if it's not very commercially competitive.
I hope our EU leaders can see this too, commit for the long term, and don't just look at financial balance sheets.
Likewise, Mistrall is using NVIDIA all over the place and has used the NVIDIA cloud for training and inferencing. Mistrals partnership with NVIDIA does not seem any different to me when compared to AWS European Sovereign cloud.
Hell, you can host actual frontier models (e.g. Claude 4) on AWS Bedrock in the EU, so "in the EU" (from a hosting perspective) cannot be Mistral's USP. If the proposition is "support EU businesses", then ok, but that is a different thing.
I've seen zero cases so far where "physically present & managed in the EU but still owned by a US company" is sufficient to mitigate the typical US hosting concerns.
The threat is that AWS could be forced to a) suddenly pull services or b) spy on data by the US administration. That the DC is located entirely in the EU does nothing to reduce that risk if it's still fully owned by Amazon.
The was already a major concern for the last couple of years given the successful legal challenges against the privacy shield as sufficient data protection to give personal data to US organizations, and is way more of a concern after issues like Karin Khan and the ICC being suddenly cut off by Microsoft - it's clear that US companies literally can & will suddenly block key business services on administration whims. There's plenty of organizations where that's unacceptable risk.
I did. Some of my clients by design host everything on German servers of Azure and call it a day.
[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trust-center/privacy/europea...
> A Microsoft spokesperson said that it had been in contact with the court since February “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services."
As an enterprise user of various models, this is absolutely wrong and false.
What matters when using models as a service is:
- type of work involved
- speed
- cost
- law compliance
And, believe it or not your benchmarks IRL are worthless for most of the things you want to give to AI (unless we talking about coding idk).
I'll provide you few examples where Mistral is by far the best option for our companies from applications in production, even ignoring the last one.
- customer care assistance. One of my clients is in the business of home renovation, customers call the company to have details about how to install/mount specific things. For my use case: OCR + information retrieval from the scanned documents + reporting to our assistancs Mistral displayed by far the best performance (they have the best AI OCR we tested) and cost effectiveness and speed.
- creating user-tailored daily financial news. We need to summarize, rank and report what happened for user-held securities during the day. The only competitive alternative here to Mistral was Google's Gemini Flash, we need to do this for tens of thousands of users. Mistral Small was absolutely up to the task, with the Medium variant for ranking and bundling. We have tested the other options and literally nobody offered the same performance/cost/speed
In case you missed it, trust has been broken.
There's nothing rational about believing this fear is irrational.
Just look at the reaction after the EU fined Google.
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.
It isn't just about "more powerful", it's also about "cheaper" or "faster".
Mistral models are faster than anything out of US (bar Gemini Flash) and are cost competitive with them.
For me, having to produce financial news in a short time span for tens of thousands of users speed and cost are important, and the fact that Opus 4.1 is "more intelligent" is worthless.
That's like telling me that a Ryzen Threadripper with 64 cores is faster than than my raspberry pi for controlling the appliances in my kitchen. It's irrelevant when it's much more expensive and energy hungry.
(For example, Mistral is my go to platform for quick answers, not necessarily precise or long. In the past, I'd use GPT 4o for this (slower than mistral but not that much), but once sama decided to mud the waters and put everything under one umbrella it makes no sense for that purpose.)
What’s the actual synergy here? The closest angle I can imagine is that AI workloads drive demand for more chips, but I believe ASML is already selling everything it can make.
I dont see how even the algorithms involved translate well. IC design is closer to a physics simulator connected to a heuristic optimizer. Mabie some ideas from alfageometry or alfafold could be applied, but thats not the kind of research mistral is doing.
And there are big players with existing expertise in the IC design space. Why not just fund them to do more research?
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.
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...
Mistral is about the only credible EU contender in the LLM space, and has been not just vocal but also in its actions very much in favor of transparancy and openness.
Interesting how these two cultures will collide.
[edit: nevermind, I speculated before reading the announcement. Reality is much more boring than that]
Personally I see this investment as much more political than technical. ASML wants to be a real 'European' champion; not just Dutch. The Dutch and German government are on board; now the French are too.
See also: new CEO is French.
It is definitely a political move.
I'm sure the French would love it, though. I always thought ASML would open a R&D facility in France or so to court the French government.
Guess this is it.
Then I can say without much speculation that this will end in a disaster.
Hiring Le Maire as a strategic advisor with his "accomplishments" should be taken as a sign of clear enshitiffication.
Mistral previously partnered with Cerebras on Le Chat: https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/mistral-le-chat
I'm quite surprised that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic appear to have done a similar deal. Their inference is slow in comparison - like 5.10x slower than what Cerebras can achieve.
Google have their own TPUs which seem to be giving them a performance edge. Google AI mode is lightning fast in comparison to GPT-5 Thinking search for result equality that looks to be in the same ballpark.
... that said, on reading the linked press release there's actually no mention of model performance at all:
> a long-term collaboration agreement to explore the use of AI models across ASML’s product portfolio as well as research, development and operations, to benefit ASML customers with faster time to market and higher performance holistic lithography systems.
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.
And it seems research is bottlenecked by computation.
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.
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.
Funny how they are investing in AI, yet the actual use of AI is lagging VERRRRYYY much behind other tech companies. Probably 2+ years behind in adoption of AI tooling.
So they have their work cut out for them when it comes to figuring out how to get their paranoid security team to enable teams to use the tools they just invested 1.7b in.
Maybe the best tech news of the year IMHO.
"In the long run, all AI models will be similar. It's about how you use the models in a well-protected environment. We will never allow our data and that of our customers to leave ASML. So a partner must be willing to work with us and adapt its model to our needs. Not only did Mistral want to do that, it is also their business model."
https://fd.nl/bedrijfsleven/1569378/asml-ceo-strategische-au...
--
Full article translated:
“A good reason to collaborate.” That's how ASML's CEO described his company's remarkable €1.3 billion investment in French AI company Mistral on Wednesday. Since the investment was leaked by Reuters on Sunday, there has been much speculation about ASML's reasons for investing in the European challenger to giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Analysts and commentators pointed to the geopolitical implications or the strong French link between the companies. But according to ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet, the reason was purely business. “Sovereignty has never been the goal.”
Mistral AI is a start-up founded in 2023 that specializes in building large language models. The French CEO of ASML and Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch met at an AI summit in Paris earlier this year and decided to work together to use Mistral's models to further improve ASML's chip machines.
Surprising investment
Each ASML machine generates approximately 1 terabyte of data per day. “Our machines are very complex,” Fouquet explains in an interview with the FD. "We have highly advanced control systems on our machines to enable them to operate very quickly and with great accuracy. The amount of data our machines generate gives us the opportunity to use AI. With the current software and machine learning models, we are limited in what we can do with the data and how quickly we can adjust the machine,“ says the CEO. ”AI is the next step in making better use of all that data."
ASML has invested in other companies in the past, such as German lens manufacturer Zeiss and Eindhoven-based photonics company Smart Photonics, but those were either suppliers or potential customers. Mistral is neither.
Running AI models in-house
According to the ASML CEO, the Dutch company's investment in Mistral stems from the conviction that both companies can create value together. If Mistral becomes more valuable as a result of the collaboration, ASML can benefit from that.
ASML is the main investor in a new €1.7 billion financing round for Mistral. This makes Mistral an important AI player in Europe, but small compared to its American rivals. OpenAI raised $40 billion in its latest round alone. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude program, which is popular among programmers, just closed a $13 billion round.
“European sovereignty was not the goal”
According to Fouquet, the reason for the collaboration lies primarily in the way Mistral develops its AI models. “In the long run, all AI models will be similar. It's about how you use the models in a well-protected environment,” says Fouquet. “We will never allow our data and that of our customers to leave ASML. So a partner must be willing to work with us and adapt its model to our needs. Not only did Mistral want to do that, it is also their business model.”
According to Fouquet, the collaboration is not motivated by a desire for greater European sovereignty. “That was not the goal. But if it contributes to that, we are happy,” says Fouquet.
ASML supports EU initiatives to strengthen the chip sector in Europe, but always maintains a politically neutral stance in the geopolitical struggle between the United States, China, and the European Union. This is understandable, as the company has major customers in all regions, such as TSMC in Taiwan, SK Hynix in South Korea, SMIC in China, and Intel in the US.
“Two birds with one stone”
Although ASML itself does not play the European card, some analysts and politicians do see such a motive for the collaboration with Mistral. “Thousands of large companies worldwide make extensive use of AI in their product development by using the services of OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Google, Mistral, without investing in these companies,” writes investment bank Jefferies in a commentary. “We also do not believe that ASML needed an investment in an AI company to benefit from AI models in its lithography products. In our view, the investment stems primarily from geopolitical motives to support and develop a European AI company and ecosystem,” the bank states.
Wouter Huygen, CEO of AI consultancy Rewire, also sees a clear link to European sovereignty. “ASML is known for taking internal technology development very far. It is therefore quite understandable that ASML is taking this step: access to and influence on the development of a strategic technology. Plus European sovereignty. That's two birds with one stone.”
The current pace of meh models releases and everyone converging on the same quality of tech can’t sustain the number of players and valuations out there. Not even close. Even the AI grifters on LinkedIn are running out of grifting steam.
I don’t know much about lithography which is why I ask - what is an AI supposed to do in a lithography machine? Does anyone know?
(… and if you can’t see the emperor’s clothes you are not pure of heart!)
We at ASML have a lot of cash. We think investing in Mistral will give us a ROI and investing in the EU right now is safer than the hellscape in the US. Politicians will like it as well. We'll let the PR firm worry about synergy.
While they might have seen some synergy with Mistral, it might also be a complete strategic and/or political investment. Mistral is the only serious "AI" company in the EU right now (if you exclude company working on the hardware side). It will very likely get a lot of support from the EU to be able to stay in the race with the U.S and China, and in a case of a IA market crash, the EU would also probably like for Mistral to have enough finance to be able to be one of the company that will survive.
By funding Mistral, ASML might be able to buy a lot of political favor, while having stakes in a company that is unlikely to completely fail in the near future due to the EU administration support.
Tehnix•4h ago
scrollaway•4h ago
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.
cgeier•4h ago
rdos•3h ago
elAhmo•3h ago
noosphr•3h ago
mkl•2h ago
noosphr•3m ago