Key points
- Samsung led Mistral AI's 3 billion euro round
- Its own stake size wasn't disclosed
- Samsung plans to run Mistral models inside its chip business
- Signed at the Elysee Palace with two presidents watching
Samsung Electronics is buying a piece of a French AI company and bringing its models inside its chip business. Samsung led Mistral AI's Series D round, which raised 3 billion euros ($3.5B), and signed a partnership to build AI tools for chip design and manufacturing. The agreement was signed on Tuesday in Paris.
The work sits in Samsung's Device Solutions division, which runs the chip business. Samsung will combine its own manufacturing and technical data with Mistral's models, including its flagship model Mistral Large, and run the result on its own machines rather than in a public cloud. The two companies say the models will be applied to defect detection and equipment optimization, with the aim of speeding up development, improving manufacturing precision and stabilizing yields in advanced memory and logic chips. Jun Young-hyun, vice chairman and head of Device Solutions, said in the announcement that AI chip design and manufacturing keep getting more complex, and that the work needs continuous innovation in semiconductor technology.
Running the models in-house is a key part of the arrangement for Samsung. Process recipes and yield data are the most closely held things Samsung owns, and using an externally hosted AI service could require that data to leave Samsung's network. Samsung's release says the on-premises setup keeps that data "entirely within the boundaries of Samsung's semiconductor infrastructure."
What Samsung actually paid is not public
Neither company disclosed the size of Samsung's stake. The round itself raised 3 billion euros, about 4.7 trillion won, and valued Mistral at more than 21 billion euros ($24.4B) three years after the company was founded, Edaily (이데일리) reported. Hankyung (한국경제) reported that Samsung's own investment is understood to be less than 1 trillion won ($745M), without naming a source for the figure. The group had already backed Mistral once, through Samsung Venture Investment, its venture capital arm, in a 2024 round. This round is Samsung Electronics' own investment. Nvidia, ASML and Microsoft have all invested in Mistral before this round.
The signing took place at the Elysee Palace during a Korea-France summit, with both presidents attending. Samsung chairman Lee Jae-yong and Mistral's co-founder and chief executive, Arthur Mensch, were there as well.
Samsung has been spending heavily on the physical side of the same problem. Samsung and SK Hynix together plan to add more than 600,000 wafers a month of memory capacity from 2028, according to the Bank of Korea. Samsung has also been taking HBM share back from SK Hynix, reaching 33 percent in the second quarter. The Mistral deal is the software side of that, and neither company has said when the first models go into the plants.
Seoul was closed when the announcement landed in Paris. Samsung shares get their first chance to react on Wednesday.
The ownership side of the company is moving too. Samsung's chairman is buying $1.45 billion in shares from his mother.
Samsung is not the only one moving models off the cloud. Microsoft wants developers to run AI models on their own PCs instead of paying for cloud tokens.
Euro figures are converted at 1.16 dollars to the euro and won figures at 1,342 won to the dollar, the Naver Finance rates on September 8, 2026.
