Mistral bags $24 billion valuation as Samsung leads funding for Europe's AI champion

JUST IN: Mistral hits a $24 billion valuation after raising €3 billion led by Samsung, in one of Europe's largest-ever tech fundraisings.

Mistral is now worth 24 billion dollars, and Samsung wrote the biggest cheque.

The French AI startup raised three billion euros on Tuesday, one of the largest tech fundraisings Europe has ever seen. Samsung led the round, and this is the man they're betting on, chief executive Arthur Mensch. He told CNBC the money goes into building Mistral's own data centres, with the compute it owns set to double over the next five years.

A year ago this company was valued at under twelve billion euros. It has doubled since, and the EU-backed Scaleup Europe Fund piled in alongside Samsung. The pitch is simple, a sovereign European alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic, not American, not Chinese, and Mensch says revenue should beat a billion dollars this year.

Europe has spent years complaining it has no AI champion. It just paid 24 billion dollars to say it has one now.

This is Liu Yang, reporting for HIT.