Mistral AI pursues €3 billion financing at €20 billion valuation

French artificial‑intelligence startup Mistral AI is in early‑stage talks to raise roughly €3 billion (about $3.5 billion) at a valuation of around €20 billion, nearly doubling the €11.7 billion price set in September. Chip‑equipment maker ASML, which invested €1.3 billion for an 11 % stake, remains the company’s largest shareholder.

Mistral is expanding its own compute infrastructure, operating data centres it owns in France and Sweden and recently securing an €830 million loan for a new facility near Paris. The firm markets itself as a European sovereign alternative to U.S. AI providers, serving governments and industrial customers such as Airbus and BMW, and is developing a rival model for European banks and cybersecurity tools. CEO Arthur Mensch said, “We must have control over this technology,” underscoring the push for domestic AI capability. The funding round would bolster the war chest needed to build compute capacity and possibly design its own chips, reducing reliance on Nvidia.