Mistral raises record €3bn as Europe strains to keep pace in AI race

{"text":[[{"start":10.32,"text":"Mistral has completed Europe’s largest-ever fundraising by a private technology company, raising €3bn in a deal that lifts its valuation to €21bn, as it strives to keep pace with its US and Chinese rivals in the AI race."}],[{"start":24.56,"text":"The French AI model maker on Tuesday announced the new funding round was led by South Korean electronics group Samsung."}],[{"start":31.28,"text":"The Paris-based company is seen as a leader in the effort to supply Europe with its own “sovereign” technology and computing infrastructure. Arthur Mensch, Mistral’s co-founder and chief executive, told the FT that the cash would remove a “key bottleneck” in securing the computing capacity needed to catch up with Chinese AI labs in “frontier” AI training."}],[{"start":51.44,"text":"“With this fundraising we will be controlling an amount of compute that is very comparable to what the Chinese labs have,” he said. “We have built Mistral to train models and to scale them. We will continue to do that and that’s really the purpose of this fundraising.”"}],[{"start":66.28,"text":"While the fundraise is a record for Europe and highlights Mistral’s place as the region’s brightest hope in AI, its size also underlines the gulf with its global rivals."}],[{"start":76,"text":"Silicon Valley-based Anthropic has raised around $100bn so far this year, ahead of an initial public offering that could value the AI company — which was founded two years before Mistral — at as much as $2tn."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":89.4,"text":"That more limited financial firepower has forced Mistral to concentrate its AI development on narrower “frontier” capabilities, instead of competing head to head on very large models, while also pivoting towards cloud computing services for companies that want to use its AI."}],[{"start":103.88,"text":"Samsung’s investment was “another validation” of Mistral’s utility in high-end manufacturing, Mensch said, after Dutch chip equipment maker ASML invested €1.3bn last year. Samsung plans to use Mistral’s AI to improve its chip manufacturing systems, he said."}],[{"start":120.08,"text":"“This funding round lays the groundwork for a long-term collaboration between the companies,” said Young Hyun Jun, who heads Samsung’s chipmaking and memory division."}],[{"start":131.78,"text":"Alongside manufacturing applications in sectors ranging from oil and gas to aerospace, Mensch said Mistral had seen growing demand for cyber security services, particularly from European banks, in the wake of the recent OpenAI incident in which its AI agents escaped testing systems and hacked software developer site Hugging Face."}],[{"start":149.32,"text":"“When you are deploying such a technology you need to be extra careful,” he said. “This is raising a lot of questions from customers about the kind of security set-up needed to deploy agents safely.”"}],[{"start":161.56,"text":"Taking a swipe at OpenAI and other US rivals, he added: “The industry has turned negligence into marketing at this point.”"}],[{"start":169.24,"text":"The EU’s Scaleup Europe fund, managed by private equity firm EQT, and PSG Equity also joined the round. It values the three-year-old company at €21bn, including the new capital, up from around €12bn a year ago."}],[{"start":184.28,"text":"Mistral launched in mid-2023, just months after ChatGPT’s debut. It quickly became Europe’s best hope to create its own AI models to compete with US and Chinese providers. Unlike OpenAI and Anthropic, Mistral’s AI models are “open”, meaning their source code is available for anybody to examine or customise, promising customers more control."}],[{"start":206.78,"text":"It made a significant strategic shift in August, when it said it would commercialise an AI model made by Chinese firm Z.ai — a move critics said undermined its claim to be a sovereign European player."}],[{"start":218.84,"text":"Mensch defended Mistral’s decision to sell Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 model as necessary to give customers choice, while still offering them “regional controls” to protect their data."}],[{"start":229.88,"text":"But Shahin Vallée, senior associate fellow at DGAP, the German Council on Foreign Relations, said the move represented a “major renouncement of ambition” both for Mistral and for Europe. “They may not have had another choice since Europe is not ready or able to deploy the needed investment, so it is pursuing a strategy of being second best.”"}],[{"start":255.68,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1788928651_4319.mp3"}