French AI powerhouse Mistral AI is reportedly in strategic discussions with Samsung Electronics to secure advanced memory chips. This crucial move by the European startup aims to guarantee a stable supply for its rapidly expanding AI infrastructure amid tightening global demand for high-performance semiconductors, industry sources revealed Sunday.
Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch, accompanied by the company’s senior executives, visited Samsung’s Hwaseong campus in Gyeonggi Province on Thursday. There, they held talks with Jun Young-hyun, vice chairman overseeing Samsung’s pivotal semiconductor business, focusing on potential cooperation in advanced AI memory technologies. This high-level visit was part of a broader French business delegation accompanying President Emmanuel Macron on his state trip to South Korea.
Further underscoring the significance of the engagement, Mensch also met with Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong during a state luncheon held on Friday.
Founded in 2023 by former engineers from Google DeepMind and Meta, Mistral AI has quickly emerged as one of Europe’s leading AI startups. The company has gained recognition for developing sophisticated large language models, including Mistral Large, its popular chatbot Le Chat, and pioneering some of the region’s early AI reasoning models.
Mistral AI has aggressively pursued securing both capital and computing resources. After successfully raising approximately 600 million euros ($691 million) in 2024 from backers like Samsung and Nvidia, it attracted an additional $1.5 billion investment from ASML last September, pushing its valuation to an impressive $11.7 billion.
Central to Mistral AI’s ambitious expansion plans is a new data center near Paris, slated to begin operations in the second quarter. This state-of-the-art facility will deploy roughly 14,000 of Nvidia’s latest GPUs, with an initial power capacity of about 44 megawatts. Mistral aims to significantly scale its total computing capacity across Europe to 200 megawatts by the end of next year.
This massive buildout is expected to drive substantial demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), an indispensable component for cutting-edge AI accelerators. Samsung Electronics stands among the elite trio of chipmakers globally producing this advanced AI memory technology.
An industry official commented, “Similar to AMD CEO Lisa Su’s recent visit to Korea to engage with Samsung, Mistral AI appears to be proactively securing a stable supply of memory in what remains a highly constrained market.”
The scope of these discussions could extend beyond just memory chips. If Mistral AI ventures into designing its own custom AI chips, cooperation could broaden to include Samsung’s advanced foundry business. Furthermore, Samsung might explore integrating Mistral’s innovative AI models into its widely popular Galaxy devices, aligning with the Korean tech giant’s strategy to bolster its on-device AI ecosystem, industry sources suggested.
