French artificial intelligence (AI) startup "Mistral AI" visited Samsung Electronics business sites to discuss cooperation on memory semiconductors, according to reports on the 5th.
Arthur Mensch, chief executive officer (CEO) of Mistral AI, came to Korea on the occasion of French President Emmanuel Macron's state visit and was said to have met on the 2nd at Samsung Electronics' Hwaseong Campus with Jun Young-hyun, vice chairman and CEO of Samsung Electronics and head of the DS (semiconductor) division, among other key officials. The two companies were said to have broadly discussed cooperation measures on the AI Semiconductor supply chain and technology.
Mistral AI was founded in 2023 by talent from Google DeepMind and Meta. It drew market attention by unveiling the large language model (LLM) "Mistral Large," which has performance similar to GPT-4, the AI model of ChatGPT operator OpenAI. Based on this, it launched the chatbot "Le Chat," dubbed the European version of ChatGPT.
It raised 1.7 billion euros (about 2.9 trillion won) from Dutch semiconductor lithography equipment maker ASML in Sep. 2025, and in just two years since its founding grew into a corporations with a valuation nearing 20 trillion won. In 2024, it also received an investment of 600 million euros from Samsung and Nvidia. Mistral AI is cited as a key player in realizing Europe's "sovereign AI" (technology sovereignty AI) that does not rely on U.S. or Chinese tech corporations.
Mistral AI is building a new data center near Paris, France. The facility, expected to go online in the second quarter of this year, is slated to be equipped with about 14,000 units of Nvidia's latest graphics processing unit (GPU) "GB300" (Blackwell). Some observers say Samsung Electronics is likely to become a principal partner supplying the high-performance memory to be installed in the infrastructure.