France’s Mistral AI seeks Samsung memory for AI expansion

Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong (right) and Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch attend a state luncheon hosted by President Lee Jae Myung for French President Emmanuel Macron at the presidential office in Seoul on Friday. (Yonhap)

France’s Mistral AI is in talks with Samsung Electronics to secure advanced memory chips, as the startup moves to lock in supply for its expanding AI infrastructure amid tightening global demand, industry sources said Sunday.

Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch and the company’s top executives visited Samsung’s Hwaseong campus in Gyeonggi Province on Thursday, where they met Jun Young-hyun, vice chairman overseeing the company’s semiconductor business, to discuss cooperation on AI memory.

The visit came as part of a French business delegation accompanying President Emmanuel Macron’s state trip to South Korea.

Mensch also met Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong during a state luncheon on Friday.

Founded in 2023 by former engineers from Google DeepMind and Meta, Mistral AI has quickly emerged as one of Europe’s leading AI startups. It has released large language models such as Mistral Large, a chatbot named Le Chat, and developed one of the region’s early AI reasoning models.

The company has moved aggressively to secure capital and compute. After raising about 600 million euros ($691 million) from backers including Samsung and Nvidia in 2024, it drew an additional $1.5 billion investment from ASML last September, pushing its valuation to about $11.7 billion

At the core of its expansion is a new data center near Paris, slated to begin operations in the second quarter. The facility will deploy roughly 14,000 of Nvidia’s latest GPUs, with an initial power capacity of about 44 megawatts. Mistral aims to scale its total computing capacity across Europe to 200 megawatts by the end of next year.

The buildout is expected to drive demand for high-bandwidth memory, a critical component for AI accelerators. Samsung is among the three chipmakers producing the advanced AI memory.

“Just as AMD’s Lisa Su recently traveled to Korea to meet Samsung, Mistral appears to be moving early to secure a stable memory supply in a tight market,” an industry official said.

The talks could expand beyond memory. If Mistral moves into designing its own AI chips, cooperation could extend to Samsung’s foundry business. Samsung could also consider embedding Mistral’s AI models into Samsung’s Galaxy devices as the Korean tech giant looks to strengthen its on-device AI ecosystem, industry sources said.