Mistral: One to Watch

Mistral has just raised another €3 billion, valuing the three-year-old French AI company at more than €21 billion.

What caught my attention wasn't simply the size of the round. It was who provided the money.

Samsung Electronics led it. NVIDIA, ASML, BNP Paribas, Salesforce Ventures and other investors also participated.

Given the questions about increasingly circular AI financing, I wanted to understand whether the same thing was happening here.

The answer: partly.

NVIDIA is the clearest example.

NVIDIA is an investor in Mistral.

Earlier this year Mistral raised $830 million in debt financing for NVIDIA Grace Blackwell infrastructure containing 13,800 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs. Mistral and NVIDIA also have a strategic technology partnership to co-develop frontier AI models.

So capital flows from NVIDIA into Mistral, while substantial infrastructure spending flows towards NVIDIA technology.

That has similarities to the criticism surrounding strategic AI investment where the investor also stands to benefit from the infrastructure spending that follows.

But the rest of Mistral's funding is more interesting.

Samsung led the round while also announcing that it will deploy Mistral technology across its semiconductor operations.

ASML invested €1.3 billion in Mistral last year and is also deploying Mistral technology in its own engineering and products.

In both cases, the investor is also becoming a customer.

BNP Paribas goes further. It is an investor, a major Mistral customer, and participated in the $830 million debt financing being used to build Mistral's infrastructure.

None of this is inherently inappropriate. Strategic investors have invested in suppliers, customers and partners for decades.

But across AI, the distinction between investor, supplier, customer, infrastructure provider and financier is becoming greatly blurred.

The important question may therefore not simply be whether any one arrangement is "circular financing".

It is whether we can still distinguish independently generated market demand from demand being enabled or accelerated by organisations that simultaneously have a financial interest in the companies generating it.

Mistral appears to be creating its own increasingly interconnected ecosystem, much like the pattern we are seeing emerge around other major AI builders.

That makes it another one worth watching closely.