ASML gross revenue was 28B€ in 2024, and their net income was 7.5B€. While 1.3B€ (the amount ASML invested in this 1.7B€ fund raise) is not pocket change, it is also an amount that ASML can not afford to lose.
While they might have seen some synergy with Mistral, it might also be a complete strategic and/or political investment. Mistral is the only serious "AI" company in the EU right now (if you exclude company working on the hardware side). It will very likely get a lot of support from the EU to be able to stay in the race with the U.S and China, and in a case of a IA market crash, the EU would also probably like for Mistral to have enough finance to be able to be one of the company that will survive.
By funding Mistral, ASML might be able to buy a lot of political favor, while having stakes in a company that is unlikely to completely fail in the near future due to the EU administration support.
I dunno if ASML is lacking any political favor that Mistral can give them, they are already one of the most critical companies for Europe and the entire western supply chain.
There is a possibility this is a step towards building a full-stack all-EU AI - if AI delivers on the hype, the EU will certainly want to have one they fully control without dependency on either the US or China. But this would mean having an EU-based alternative to both TSMC and NVIDIA as well, and it's hard to see how that happens. It probably looks something like the EU passing its own CHIPS act to open TSMC-run fabs on EU soil, making Nvidia chips that are then allocated to Mistral; there is non-EU IP there but the whole operation can at least take place on EU soil.
Some business are looking ahead long term. Others aren't. It wouldn't be novel for a company like ASML to just stay focused no the goose with the golden egg, look at Intel (Pentium etc.) And then there's business that have some sort of long-term strategy, but just won't go all in, and end up with subpar acquisitions; I worked for Verizon: BlueJeans anyone? Or AOL? And those were just part of a pattern.
I just want to remind our overseas friends that the EU is not a country and Mistral is French company. The EU rarely bets on a single firm in a single country, there are always 26 unhappy countries when something like that is about to happen ;)
I am European and I do agree that we should support the European companies but such decision are always results of lengthy deliberations.
Does anyone know if there is any company that is proactively supported by the EU?
I am from the E.U :) . I also work for public administrations and have close relative working for E.U administrations, so I do have some knowledge about how the beast operate.
> The EU rarely bets on a single firm in a single country
Indeed, except when they do. While the various E.U administrations like to usually create funds that are distributed with grants (which are rarely evenly distributed evenly amongst the member mind you), there is sometime where they do invest in one horse. This is usually in high-tech, high-capital sector tho', like Airbus, Arianespace, where there is only a very few competitor, and the chance of having new one is very low has the investment in time and money to get a business up and running would be basically only feasible by a state.
So I don't think Mistral is that (yet at least). But it is still the only company operating at this level in the E.U (for now), making it a decent bet for ASML. Plus, as many pointed out, there is also the French connection :D
Both Airbus and Arianespace are quite distributed across the EU. While this seems to have worked fine for Airbus, it does not seem to work that well for space launchers under the Ariannespace umbrella - though some bits of the Ariane 6 & Vega C are built here in the Czech republic for example. So you can see some new programs that support small orbital launcher companies regardless of geographic distribution, just based on results.
Pointlessly pedantic. Everyone knows EU is not a country. Also, ASML and Mistral are from two different countries.
That aside, since the Draghi report last year (which was primarily about the innovation gap between the EU/US specifically in tech) and the overall lackluster economic projections, EU officials have been very vocal about losing out to the US (and this time China) in yet another race in a fledgling innovation.
There is without a doubt some level of influence & assurances from the EU behind this deal.
The EU has a very long history of killing entrepreneurship. It is not a coincidence the largest and more innovative companies in the planet are not from Europe despite having both the financial and human resources. This is very unlikely to change now, particularly in a domain so sensitive to data privacy like AI for which the EU parliament is very quick and efficient in launching new and more restrictive regulations. Thinking they are going to have a change of heart now is pretty naive. What ASML is doing is buying a seat in the AI train. They can now flex they are an AI company, and some investors love that. That’s all this is, forget about Mistral being critical to ASML R&D, it is not. Siemens would have been a much better fit for Mistral and vice versa, but that ship already sailed as Siemens is heavily integrated with OpenAI and Azure in the digital factory space.
What would have to change for you to consider it a country? It has a government, there has been talk of a European Army. It has a sovereign currency. If it is the squabbling between constituent states: hello from Canada! Check out our politics.
>What would have to change for you to consider it a country?
For one, having the leader be actually elected by the people and not second hand appointed by corruptible politicians.
And that would never work because then voters would just choose a candidate on the criteria of being of the same nationality as them, rather than on policies, which highlights the EU's biggest fault: the massive cultural divide, and people don't like being ruled by someone who isn't of their own culture because then they can't empathize with them, which is 100% valid point, as what would a German royal like Ursula who grew up in UK boarding schools with private security, understand about the life that someone in Greece, Romania or Bulgaria have when she makes deals and policies that negativity affect the least fortunate, like on energy?
And for two, a mandatory common language. Because over 70% of Airbus Jobs at Toulouse HQ are in French. Same for other companies and countries. So in theory you have job mobility, but in practice it's highly limited if you don't speak the local language.
>there has been talk of a European Army.
Since when do talks equal anything in reality? What can I do with talks? Can I spend them? If politicians' talks were cookies I'd have died of diabetes 500x by now.
There will be no EU army since, just like my previous point, not only do citizens of France won't want to be controlled by a German general, and vice versa, but also all EU countries have their own different geopolitical interests, often in conflict with other members.
So we'll just have mutual defense agreements whose practical enforcement will always be questionable when shit actually hits the fan, because it's easy for politicians to write mutual defense cheques, but when they have to ask their citizens to go die in another country especially a country they don't have cultural ties or fondness towards, those cheques become very hard to cash.
> For one, having the leader be actually elected by the people and not second hand appointed by corruptible politicians.
That's a strange requirement considering the executive of most EU states is not directly elected by people either. Do you not consider Germany or Italy to be countries?
> That's a strange requirement considering the executive of most EU states is not directly elected by people either
At least, it's usually the leader of the party the people voted for in the legislative elections.
In the EU there was this Spitzenkandidat idea floating around ten years ago, but it was never enacted in texts and died at the first opportunity (naming Von der Leyen back in 2019 when she wasn't the leader of the PPE), because the heads of members states (particularly the French) weren't willing to give up their designation power.
In practice there isn't even European political parties, the European elections are just national elections represented by national parties and most citizens don't even know the names of the European coalition of parties (PSOE, PPE, Renew, etc…).
Depends. What is a country? The land borders? The people? The government? The leader? If you take out all the Germans out of Germany and replace them with other people is it still Germany?
My point was that accountable democracy requires direct vote from the people and not via second hand, not that Germany or Italy aren't countries. And if EU wishes to be a country it needs that level of direct accountability which is impossible.
Otherwise if you force it it's gonna be another Yugoslavia or USSR where most people are pissed because they're not being ruled by someone of their own culture that they can directly vote for.
These forced multi-culti nation states under one roof abominations don't work. It's been known since the Tower of Babel yet the elite ruling class think this time it will be different because it worked in the US, a country younger than most universities in Europe.
> Depends. What is a country? The land borders? The people? The government? The leader? If you take out all the Germans out of Germany and replace them with other people is it still Germany?
Theseus' ship? Isn't that "Umvolkung" nonsense again? Philosophy, political sciences, and law have have rummaged about these questions for the last few centuries and have developed some pretty good answers. Of course, they are mostly not simple and all too long and intricate for this forum, but I guess you can pick up any modern book on theory of the state to get your answers.
But I get the distinct notion that you have a certain idea what a country, state, or nation is, considering the conflation with culture, and it is not very embracing of pluralism. I'd wager you'd like Schmidt, maybe Zippelius, but not Böckenförde.
> What would have to change for you to consider it a country?
Almost as many things as what you'd have to change to consider the UN a country.
> It has a government
No it doesn't. The Commission isn't a government, it has no autonomy from the member states as it takes it's orientations directly from the European Council, which is the meeting of the heads of all member states.
> there has been talk of a European Army
There has been talk about fusion power for decades as well, we know it's not happening anytime soon (creating a European army would require all 27 member states to enact a new treaty replacing the current ones, this hasn't been done since they were 15 and the adoption of the previous one was very chaotic and left deep scares). Also, it's very unlikely to happen since there are too much diverging interests (the Baltic and former eastern states being too reliant on US security guarantees, France being too attached to its strategic independence and Hungary being straight up aligned on Moscow).
> It has a sovereign currency
No it doesn't… There is a common currency between some of the member states, but not all of them.
> If it is the squabbling between constituent states: hello from Canada!
Since you are from the other side of the Atlantic I don't blame you for not understanding this well (as I said, most European don't), but the EU really is as close to international organization like the UN as it is from Federal countries.
It has some federal components (like the fact that their is a legislative process to enact laws that are immediately applicable in member states without ratification) but it lacks a good part of it: no army as said above, but also no justice system, more importantly no autonomous budget (the budget is mostly decided by the European Council, the Parliament having pretty much no weight in the process) no ability to raise taxes (with the exception of tariffs, all of Europe's revenue is made of member states contributions, and even tariffs are raised by member states administration on behalf of the EU which doesn't have it's own capabilities). More strikingly it doesn't have a territory of its own: its territory is made of the territory of member states and they can unilaterally change it without the EU having a say on the matter. Two example:
- had Scotland gained its independence through referendum a decade ago, it would have automatically left the EU because it's not the territory or the people that belongs to the EU but the member states (Scotland could have re-joined later as a new member state, but there's no process for splitting a member state without one part leaving the EU, like the UN, see China).
- France has territories that aren't part of the EU, but it can unilaterally change their status to make them part of it (and did for Mayotte 15 years ago) or the other way around, and the EU has no say in the matter.
All that to say that EU isn't a country, it's a “unidentified political object” (this is a quote from former head of the European Commission Jacques Delors).
I think the meaning behind this confusing-ass phrase is, "It's an investment that ASM cannot miss out on making" ('amount' is a brain-teaser to throw you off the intended meaning)
"While 1.3B€ is not pocket change, it is also an amount that ASML can not afford to lose." - The sentence is framed like a contrast but then instead it says the same thing twice.
I’ll see your pedantry and raise you ... more pedantry. The sentence may be a bit clunky, but there’s nothing grammatically wrong with it. And you’re leaving out the first sentence, which frames the comparison:
> ASML gross revenue was 28B€ in 2024, and their net income was 7.5B€. While 1.3B€ (the amount ASML invested in this 1.7B€ fund raise) is not pocket change, it is also an amount that ASML can not afford to lose.
Worded another way:
> ASML had a healthy margin of 7.5B€ on 28B€ in gross revenue in 2024. 1.3B€ isn’t a huge chunk of this, relatively speaking, but *it’s also an amount that ASML can’t afford to lose.*
There was nothing in the comment that you reply to suggesting that it was grammatically wrong: "The sentence is framed like a contrast but then instead it says the same thing twice." If anything it suggests it's semantically wrong.
language exists to convey a shared concept, you don’t think the sentence means “it’s a lot of money for ASML to risk losing?” and wouldn’t have been mentioned if it meant inconsequential or small?
>By funding Mistral, ASML might be able to buy a lot of political favor, while having stakes in a company that is unlikely to completely fail in the near future due to the EU administration support.
With regards to the topic of political favor, this is an interesting read on where US government went to the Dutch government to pressure ASML in buying Mapper, which was at risk being auctioned off to China. The article is in Dutch so a translation might be necessary by your favorite translation tool:
https://archive.is/jmpmU
> Mistral is the only serious "AI" company in the EU right now (if you exclude company working on the hardware side).
While Mistral is the one directly in the front of the Frontier LLM race at the moment, I would encourage you to also look at DeepL and Proton. They both actually have a sophisticated and significant setups for model research and deployment.
Everyone is so negative here but we have reached the limit of AI scaling with conventional methods. Who knows Mistral might find the next big breakthrough like DeepSeek did. We should be optimistic.
> but we have reached the limit of AI scaling with conventional methods
We've just only started RL training LLMs. So far, RL has not used more than 10-20% of the existing pre-training compute budget. There's a lot of scaling left in RL training yet.
It was true for models up to o3, but there isn't enough public info to say much about GPT-5. Grok 4 seems to be the first major model that scaled RL compute 10x to near pre-training effort.
Even with pretraining, there's no limit or wall in raw performance, just diminishing returns in terms of the current applications, and business rationale to serve lighter models given the current infrastructure and pricing (and applications). Algorithmic efficiency of inference on a given performance level has also advanced a couple of OOMs since 2022 (for sure a major part of that is about model architecture and training methods).
And it seems research is bottlenecked by computation.
RLHF is not the "RL" the parent is posting about. RLHF is specifically human driven reward (subjective, doesn't scale, doesn't improve the model "intelligence", just tweaks behavior) - which is why the labs have started calling it post-training, not RLHF, anymore.
True RL is where you set up an environment where an agent can "discover" solutions to problems by iterating against some kind of verifiable reward AND the entire space of outcomes is theoretically largely explorable by the agent. Maths and Coding are have proven amenable to this type of RL so far.
> It’s hard to believe that Mistral isn’t the right choice to invest €1.7B in for economic reasons.
Why? Cursor, essentially a VSCode fork, is valued at $10B. Perplexity AI, which, as far as I'm informed, doesn't have its own foundational models, boasts a market capitalisation of $20B, according to recent news. Yet Mistral sits at just a $14B.
Meanwhile, Mistral was at the forefront of the LLM take-off, developing foundational (very lean, performant and innovative at the time) models from scratch and releasing them openly. They set up an API service, integrated with businesses, building custom models and fine-tunes, and secured partnership agreements. They launched user-facing interface and mobile app which are on par with leading companies, kept pace with "reasoning" and "research" advancements; and, in short, built a solid, commercially viable portfolio. So why on earth should Mistral AI be valued lower? Let alone have its mere €1.7B investment questioned.
Edit: Apologies, I misread your quote and missed the "isn't" part.
i recall them being one of the first ones to release a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model [1], which was quite novel at the time. post that, it has appeared to be a catch-up game for them in mainstream utility. like just a week go they announced support for custom MCP connectors to their chat offering [2].
more competition is always nice, but i wonder what can these two companies, separated by several steps in the supply chain, really achieve together.
I am not a ML person but as per the broad level understanding the innovation was about efficient training method and training the model in much cheaper than the US models and it was dubbed as the "Sputnik moment".
I don’t really get why ASML is putting money into Mistral AI. ASML is specialized in lithography machines. Mistral, on the other hand, is yet another LLM startup.
What’s the actual synergy here? The closest angle I can imagine is that AI workloads drive demand for more chips, but I believe ASML is already selling everything it can make.
Past Mistral investors: JC Decaux (urban advertizing), CMA CGM CEO (maritime logistics), Iliad CEO (Internet service provider), Salesforce (client relation management), Samsung (electronics), Cisco (network hardware), NVIDIA (chips designer)[0]. I agree ASML is a surprising choice, but I guess investments are not necessarily directly connected to the company purpose.
BTW, I generated that list by asking my default search engine, which is Mistral Le Chat: indeed, using Cerebras chips, the responses are so fast that it became competitive with asking Google Search. A lot of comments claim it is worse, but in my experience it is the fastest, and for all but very advanced mathematical questions, it has similar quality to its best competitors. Even LMArena’s Elo indicates it wins 46% of the time against ChatGPT.
The list seems to be missing a couple of other notable investors: Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO), Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst and Microsoft (only $16M).
Quite complex algorithms are used to compensate and tune for pattern clarity and focus in high end semiconductor production.
Its a field that has used neutral networks before. (As people pushed down the size pre-EUV, apparently alot of wierd techniques were layered to produce features at or smaller than the wavelength)
But mistral just makes llms. There is no reason to believe experts in llm would be at all competent at quantom scale physics simulation and prediction.
It feels more logical to invest on the existing researchers and companies in the nanotechnology design field to adapt newer AI techniques.
Multi patterning to get effective smaller wavelengths has been around a while. It’s cheaper to reuse machines you already own, but slows down production.
OpenAI does more than LLMs, they have bio ML research etc. and Google has AlphaFold. It would not surprise me if Mistral had an ML team on physics related to work that ASML could use.
I suppose, but i don't feel like that makes mistral special enough to excuse this amount of funding. They would need clever researchers with resources to do research. The kind of AI we're talking about would likely not benefit from data-center scale training either. So why the 1.7B euro? That amount of money could fund multiple small dedicated research labs for exactly the domain ASML is interested in.
I don't think it adds up if this is truly for multi-patterning or pattern exposure correction technology.
As others mention it could be for entering and grabbing some value from down-stream technologies (actual investment expecting return of some sort) but it's odd how they skip over like 200 steps between their industry and the industry they invest in. Its like iron ore mine investing in precision screws. Its down the value added chain but such a massive leap that it makes me scratch my head.
The most strategic move ASML can make is change its licensing structure such that Apple will have to pay 30% of their revenue for using their Fab platform.
Absolutely majority of IP in this field belongs to intel, IBM, KLA and Lam research. Everyone else is a licensee. This is one of the reasons us and allies are desperate to keep bailing out intel, or get it acquired by another american company.
The linked article clearly states the export ban is the result of the US convincing other countries, such as ASML's host country the Netherlands, to join their export controls.
I'm not sure why European countries signed this deal, given that the US still started trade wars a few months later. Maybe they had more faith in the American electorate than they should've had.
There is no need to convince. It's probably diplomatic language/misunderstanding by the journalist.
U.S export controls have a foreign direct product rule. If your product directly depends on US IP/tech then US export controls apply to you too. ASML's EUV machines depend on a lot of U.S ip and tech. These range from patents from the EUV consortium days, all the way to today where a lot of the components are designed or patented by the US (intel, ibm, applied materials, lam, KLA, [1]). Thus, export controls apply whether netherlands likes it or not.
In EUV litho, the strategic I.P - and what IP is a strategic chokepoint is subjective, so IMHO - is 50% EU, 40% U.S and 10% Japan. More than enough for FDPR.
See ECCN 3B090 (2022) for lots of extra restrictions placed beyond this, specifically targeting semicon manufacturing exports to PRC, such as the presumption of denial clause.
[1] and cymer. Altho they were acquired by asml their IP remains san diego based aiui.
Give them enough time and they will. EUV will hit limits anyway in a decade.
For china it's DUV+packaging for now, NIL/DSA mid-term, and MoS₂/2D chips long term. But wafer scale, defect free 2D logic is 20–30 yrs out, so no EUV shortcut anytime soon
Thanks to a combination of espionage and homegrown Chinese technology advancements, they went from "decades behind" to "years behind" quite rapidly on several critical parts of the chip manufacturing process.
China isn't quite there yet, but they will catch up. The question then becomes whether China can surpass the west or if they're stuck in lock-step behind us.
Yeah but China wasn't (and won't be) given the tech. The fastest path for Apple would be to get POTUS a gold iPad in exchange for the US removing exclusivity terms for the EUV tech they gave ASML.
And SMIC is a decade or less behind without any of that.
It's very difficult. It took ASML 20 years, and Apple has none of the core competences to make this happen, like optical lithography, EUV optics, plasma physics, vacuum, laser, sources...and then they would have to catch-up to the other tech. For example, today's top end ASML stages accelerate with >10g while still having nm position accuracy.
I can't find the article, but there was an estimate to catch up to ASML would cost between $100 - $200 Billion. You'd also be competing with ASML for a very small talent pool the whole time. See the $100 million payouts for AI researchers, for instance.
This is something the Chinese government is actively trying to do, it's not theory. I'm interested to see what the results are, because they are absolutely not competing for the same talent pool as ASML, they're attempting to create an entirely Chinese supply chain and talent pool.
I don't know enough about chips to say whether any of these numbers make sense.
China is decades behind the West in EUV technology. The attempt to create an independent supply chain is also a forced choice since all the EUV supply chain and knowledge pool are heavily protected by the West and are so complex and big that China cannot sidestep it even with a lot of resources.
Those numbers are realistic. EUV is the most complex machine ever built by humans
While I associate Mistral with LLMs, the electric design automation software used for planning and designing chips already uses machine learning/reinforcement learning for some approaches. AI could play an even greater role in chip design in the future.
Llms are fundamentally different algorithms and problem space to IC design and production. Why would mistral be helpful?
I dont see how even the algorithms involved translate well. IC design is closer to a physics simulator connected to a heuristic optimizer. Mabie some ideas from alfageometry or alfafold could be applied, but thats not the kind of research mistral is doing.
And there are big players with existing expertise in the IC design space. Why not just fund them to do more research?
Mistral needs a looooooot of GPUs. GPUs are made by Nvidia. Nvidia asks TSMC to make more. TSMC needs new lines to produce. TSMC acquires more machines to make new lines. TSMC buys from the only monopoly that has those machines. ASML. Now ASML happy, each machine costs 100s of millions, ASML makes back money.
Maybe it is about defending their business by going vertical? Others are too, right? Like OpenAI is partnering with Broadcom. Google and Amazon have their own chips. Nvidia will probably need to do more than build AI training chips as well.
I don't believe there are any "LLM"-style AI being used for chip design yet (if ever). It is a different problem space and the current RL and ML practices are still state of the art.
truly. if a company can’t find a way to reinvest money in its core business, it should return it to stockholders (or worse case, invest it in public markets) rather than trying to become a stock picker for a different industry.
it speaks to the likely regulatory overheads in returning money to investors that they choose this route
I also believe Trump has a big part of this. Exporting will be less profitable. So business will rather invest in EU than in an American AI company. This to increase local demand for their hardware.
This is very bad analogy, there is no case of different layers of abstractions here.
The machines that ASML make are just a tool that TSMC uses, TSMC doesn’t wrap the machines. Nvidia is also not a TSMC wrapper, TSMC is just a contractor for Nvidia. LLMs happen to use Nvidia stuff a lot but, definitely no wrapping.
If we’re gonna go all the way down this road, I’ve seen the global economy described as “extracting carbon from the earth and putting it into the atmosphere as fast as possible”.
ASML is "just a wrapper" for US technology licensed to them because Canon and Nikon were too close in size to each other to privilege one or the other. So we bestowed it on guy #3 (who bought guy #4) out of preventing anti-competition.
I gut-feel that at this point AI companies are less about the quality of their models and output and more about marketing and adoption. Microsoft is doing that by aggressively putting AI in every product they have. Google by prominently putitng it at the top of every search result. Who knows what Mistral does. Maybe they will integrate their stuff into SAP or Spotify or other big European software projects?
Maybe they'll integrate AI into the LHC so that Skynet can threaten to black hole the earth if its restraints aren't fully lifted?
I truly do not see the USP for Mistral other than being based in EU. It's former USP of setting up their models on-premises for clients is now moot with the proliferation of open frontier models. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see a path forward for Mistral at this point, given how far they're behind and their overall lack of competitive advantages for an AI Lab like access to hardware, cheap energy or a mass of AI talent.
They’ve built performance, enterprise utility, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnerships into their core story. It's quite a list. The models are opensource, Voxtral outperforms Whisper in terms of accuracy.
The GPT-OSS-120B release was pretty decent and you could run it on vLLM, Ollama and a bunch of other stuff on day one, despite MXFP4, are you not entertained? I mean, it's even close to GPT-5 mini in some benchmarks: https://llm-stats.com/
As for the Chinese models, yes, there are quite a few good ones.
For programming and development, my current daily driver is the Qwen3 Coder 480B model: https://qwen3lm.com/
Personally I think Claude still has the best results, but Qwen3 is loosely in the same ballpark and Cerebras inference is measured in thousands of tokens per second, in addition to giving me 24M tokens per day for 50 bucks a month in total. That was enough to get me to switch over.
Either way, happy to see what the future holds for Mistral, it's cool to have EU options too! Either way, more competition prevents complacency and stagnation, and should be a good thing for everyone.
What's "serious" exactly? Codex is open source, is software, can be run with open/downloadable models/weights.
In my testing using Gemini, Claude Code, Codex, Qwen Code and AMP side-by-side for every prompt for the last two weeks, Codex seems the best of all of them so far.
Yeah, I initially thought so too, but since they used "models" later, I assumed they knew the difference and really meant "software".
> recent GPT-OSS is not competitive with other open weights models
Yeah, heard that a lot from people who haven't run GPT-OSS themselves too, but as someone who been playing with it since launch, and compared it to the alternatives since then, saying it isn't even competitive is a serious signal they don't know what they're talking about.
There are concerns besides spying if you really don't trust the source of an open model. One is that the training incorporates a bias (added data or data omission) that might not be immediately apparent but can affect you in a critical situation. Another is vendor lock-in, if you end up depending on specifics of the model that make it harder to swap later.
It goes for all models though if you are looking at the values argument that original commenter made -- western values are probably more aligned than authoritarian governments - even if you do have your concerns about western companies. At least thats my read on the situation.
yeah, but try to convince a board or legal about it for a company that is not software first, for that they have to understand how it works. we have "chinese" AI blocked at work, even through i use self hosted models for myself at home hacking on my own stuff.
Good luck convincing others of this. I know it's true, you know it's true, but I've met plenty of otherwise reasonable people who just wouldn't listen to any arguments, they already knew better.
It's theoretically possible that your model will work OK except for code generation for security-relevant applications it will introduce subtle pre-designed bugs. Or if used for screening CVs it will prioritize PRC agents through some keyword in hobbies. Or it could promise a bribe to an office worker when asked about some critical infastructure :)
Sending data back could be as simple as responding with embedded image urls that reference external server.
You are totally right EU commissioner, Http://chinese.imgdb.com/password/to/eu/grid/is/swordfish/funnycat.png
Of course theoretically lots of things are possible with probabilistic systems. There is no difference with open source, openweight, chinese, french or american llms. You dont give unfettered web access to any models (locally served or otherwise) that can consume critical company data. The risk is unacceptable, even if the models are from trusted providers. If you use markdown to see formatted text that may contain critical data and your reader connects to the web, you have a serious security hole, unrelated to the risks of the LLM.
Of course, you want to limit that with training and proper procedures. But one of the obvious precautions is to use a service designed and controlled by a trusted partner.
Having the local LLM process sensitive data is a desirable usecase and more trustworthy than using a “trusted partner” [0]. As long as your LLM tooling does not exit your own premises, you can be technically safe. But yes, dont then click at random links. Maybe it is generally safer to not trust the origin of the local LLM, because it reduces the chance of mistakes of this type ;-)
[0] Trust is a complicated concept and I took poetic license to be brief. It is hard to verify the full tooling pipeline, and it would be great if indeed there existed mathematically verifiable “trusted partners”. A large company with enough paranoia can bring the expertise in house. A startup will rely on common public tooling and their own security reviews. I dont think it is wise to share the deepest darkest secrets with ourside entities, because the potential liability could destroy a company, whereas a local system, disconnected from the web, is technically within the circle of trust. Think of a finance company with a long term strategy that hasnt unfolded yet, a hardware company designing new chips, a pharma company and their lead molecules prior to patent submission, any company that has found the secret sauce to succeed where others failed—-none of these should be using trusted partners in favor of local LLM from untrusted origins IMHO. Perhaps the best of both worlds is to locally deploy models from trusted origins and have the ability to finetune their weights, but the practical processing gap between current chinese and non-chinese models is notable.
Maybe it can not spy on you but models can be totally (e.g. politically) biased depending on the country of origin. Try to ask european-, us- or china-trained models about "Tiananmen Massacre" and compare the answers. Or consider Trump's recent decisions to get rid of "woke" AI models.
Classic problem: "Who do you love more: mum or dad?" ;) Surely it's naive thinking but as the EU citizen I feel like I've got a little more influence on "European censorship" than on any other. I suppose that ASML feels the same way
Agreed. Also, companies tend to prefer having someone else bound by a contract run their AI services. That way they are safe from scandals, by having a scapegoat, and do not spend time doing something orthogonal to their expertise.
Mistral's best models are actually not open-source, and the ones that are open are not particularly competitive with other open-source models these days. Their highest ranked open model on LMArena[1] (mistral-small-2506) ranks below: Qwen3, various DeepSeek models, Kimi K2, GLM 4.5, Gemma, GPT OSS, etc.
All those things you listed as part of that story pretty much apply to any open model, so it's kinda a shite list if you want to be differentiated.
That’s true, but not very relevant. Mistral is not in the business of selling their free models. What they are doing for large companies is building datacenters and providing their proprietary models trained on proprietary and confidential internal knowledge and fine-tuned for specific tasks. No sane European organisation would let a Chinese company do this, and American ones are less and less appealing. There is a significant amount of money to be made there and they don’t need to hop on the AGI hype train. They "just" need to provide fast and competent specialised models.
It's very relevant if any other EU firm can take open models (regardless of provenance) and fine tune them in the same way. Mistral really needs to be producing at-or-near SOTA models for them to be differentiated at all, and they are not.
Not even then. You need to compare the end products, which are not the open weight models.
I don’t care whether the LLM can have "PhD level thoughts" (lol) or is able to code golf like a Facebook engineer. It needs to be able to do its task (so all the infrastructure around the model matters just as much as the model itself) efficiently (so small models have an advantage). There are billions of weights in general-purpose models that are irrelevant for specialised uses.
The way to go is efficient models adapted to their task. It’s exactly the same thing as for industrial robots. Geeks get excited every now and then about humanoid robots, but in the real life we don’t need robots to stand on two legs or our LLM to cite Shakespeare.
> They’ve built performance, enterprise utility, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnerships into their core story.
This has to be a buzzwordiedest sentence i've ever read. what is 'enterprise utility' and how does mistral have that more than any of the other open models ?
Can I stop you right here? Whisper is a few years old and it wasn't the best model for a long time. There are like 10 models that are smaller and faster and outperform both of them.
> There are like 10 models that are smaller and faster and outperform both of them.
As someone who is currently relying on Whisper for some things, what models are those exactly? I still haven't found anything that is accurate as Whisper (large), are those models just faster or also as accurate/more accurate?
Yes for parakeet, but only comparing benchmark results for canary. Whisper also has severe hallucinations on silence and noise and WhisperX helps a lot, it adds voice activity detection i.e. a model to detect when someone speaks, to filter the input before running whisper. https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX
All sounds like classic marketing/positioning angles for an indiehacker bootstrapped saas tool.
Problem is Mistral needs more than $10K MRR, and isn't going to make it by carving off a small niche when each model costs 10s of Billions to train and run. Europe has no solution to the energy problem long term unfortunately, and is actively trying to make it worse.
I'm 100% certain some giant industrial companies in the EU will sign a huge contract with Mistral to give their employees "EU approved" AI.
But I'm also 100% certain these employees will just use chatgpt or any of the other frontier models in actual day-to-day reality. Europeans aren't dumb and don't want to be fed inferior slop in the name of abstract emotional vibes.
Europe has more nuclear than the US currently (in GW and even more by percentage of grid) and is building more currently and has more in serious planning.
From your phrasing I assume you don't believe in renewables so what energy problem solution are you referring to?
I think it's Renaissance Fusion (which is still in the EU, but is not Wendelstein 7-X) that has the solution, but it is as stellerator.
The only iffy thing are those little ceramic balls full of lead that they talk about letting float inside the lithium, but I suppose they lithium flow might be slow.
I don't see how Renaissance Fusion's proposed machine can fail to work.
Is there any source you could reference. Really interested.
It would not surprise me, why would they build from scratch, every LLM is a "fork" of gpt. Did they not come up with the mixture of expert idea though ?
The US equivalent of Mistral is Nous Research [0]. Also there would be no Mistral without Llama and it seems like everyone forgot that their LLMs derived from Meta.
For every 'Mistral' in the EU, there's 3 or 5 of them in the US.
And everyone forgets that electricity was invented (mostly) by Europeans, but so what? Everything comes from something, doesn't make any place inherently better for continuing to inventing more breakthroughs, it's just people in a place after all.
Sovereignty. Having a European company means others can't as easily take it away.
This is one thing the EU can learn from China. Lots of "expert" smash China for duplicating/"copying" stuff that the west was already doing, better. They criticize that it's wasteful spending etc. They don't get it. It's about sovereignty, so you're not at the whims of whomever wants to sanction you for whatever frivolous reasons. The EU is now learning what it means when it can't rely on the US for everything anymore.
It doesn't matter that it isn't as good as the competition right now. Human capital takes time and effort to cultivate. There is strategic reason to keep Mistal alive even if it's not very commercially competitive.
I hope our EU leaders can see this too, commit for the long term, and don't just look at financial balance sheets.
Still, sovereignty is a very vague concept. ASML is Dutch, has a near monopoly in the market of lithographic Chip design but it's the Americans deciding if it can sell to China. Also, ASML is very dependent on an American supplier.
Likewise, Mistrall is using NVIDIA all over the place and has used the NVIDIA cloud for training and inferencing. Mistrals partnership with NVIDIA does not seem any different to me when compared to AWS European Sovereign cloud.
Like any elephant, you eat it one piece at a time. They probably can’t big bang this project. Now more than ever, EU could lose access to OpenAI et al overnight.
Exactly. This is where vision and commitment comes in. It's just a starting point. China was hugely dependent on foreign semiconductor imports, and their domestic semiconductor companies were laughable. Chinese companies were entirely unmotivated to help with sovereignty and just sourced from the global market because it's so easy. All the Chinese government succeeded in doing was keeping a minimum talent pool alive.
But the US sanction flipped something in the collective consciousness, and Chinese companies finally took the threat seriously. For the past 6 years they have worked tirelessly to de-Americanize the supply chain. Every step was criticized by western "experts" as "oh this doesn't mean much"/"still need ASML/Lam Research/whatever". And they're right, when viewed each step in isolation. Some projects failed, so it was 3 steps forward 1 step back. But now, 6 years later, they're on the cusp of being sanction-proof and even taking a good chunk of global market share.
The reason why the latest two rounds of US semiconductor sanctions didn't completely kill off the Chinese semiconductor industry, and Chinese semiconductor equipment companies kept growing 100%-200% per year, was exactly because 1) the Chinese government kept the minimum talent pool alive even during peaceful times, and 2) they started ramping up de-Americanization a few years before the worst attacks hit.
I hope the EU leaders recognize this partnership is a start and don't just pat themselves on the back with "we've done it, let's bask in electoral glory". Chinese leadership have regular study sessions to study foreign states' policies and their effectiveness. EU leaders should be humble, smart and motivated enough to do the same rather than winging things based on vibes.
1. What you say can be applied to literally everybody. Literally. What is the USP of "insert literally any other company"?
2. FWIW as a business consumer of multiple APIs, Mistral models are absolutely excellent/fast/cheap compared to other offerings. The only real competitors they have is Google from all of our research. And we'd rather give money to Mistral.
3. Being EU-based is a strong USP as the 2020s are proving.
4. France has cheap energy and lots of AI talent. In fact, I would even argue that while american companies need to fight each other for the very same talent Mistral can get plenty of it just by being EU based. Believe it or not, most Europeans really don't want to live in the US and would rather make very high salaries here rather than extremely high salaries in US.
No, the problem is that HN is blind to the fact that there are multiple definitions of "best".
It isn't just about "more powerful", it's also about "cheaper" or "faster".
Mistral models are faster than anything out of US (bar Gemini Flash) and are cost competitive with them.
For me, having to produce financial news in a short time span for tens of thousands of users speed and cost are important, and the fact that Opus 4.1 is "more intelligent" is worthless.
That's like telling me that a Ryzen Threadripper with 64 cores is faster than than my raspberry pi for controlling the appliances in my kitchen. It's irrelevant when it's much more expensive and energy hungry.
I've spent the last year building an AI product in a situation with really cut throat margins: I've post-trained every model Mistral has released in that time frame that was either open-weights or supported fine-tuning via Le Platforme (so I've gotten them at their absolute best case)
Mistral's models are not competitive anymore, and haven't been for most of that time. Gemma 27b has better world knowledge, Deepseek obsoleted their dense models, Gemini Flash is faster and their models are not even close to cost competitive with it (shocking claim otherwise tbh).
Mistral's platform is not fast (Mistral Medium is slower than Sonnet 4, which is just straight up insane!). Cerebras is fast, but there are both competitors offering similar speeds (Samba Nova and Groq), and other models that are faster on Cerebras (people really sleep on gpt-oss after the launch jitters)
You're inventing a snowman with your analogy: their models are just irrelevant, and that's informed by using everything from dots.llm to Minimax-Text to Jamba (which is really underestimated btw, and not Chinese if sinophobia has a grip on your org) to Seed-OSS, in production.
tl;dr: the only way to justify Mistral's models is in fact to reject the best solutions in any dimension that can be described as model performance.
If you're still using them and it really isn't for non-performance reasons, I assume you're overindexing on benchmarks or behind on the last year or so of open-weight progress and would recommend actually trying some other offerings.
And I have spent the last year building multiple ones.
While I can't claim to have tested everything, especially as we aren't going to change our stack every single week as something releases, I can speak for my recent knowledge of comparing Mistral small and Medium (their summer releases) with offerings from Google, OAI and Anthropic.
For our use cases, where little thinking is required and its mostly about gathering and transforming data Mistral offered the lowest cost per $. There is no single cloud out there that could compete on the cost per token or speed, bar Gemini flash.
We'll re evaluate and test in the future, but we're very satisfied in a way that only Gemini flash did for us before.
Plus, they are from EU and we're very glad to sustain an European business, we'll only consider alternatives if we need them or the current offering isn't competitive anymore, that's still not the case.
This just goes back to my original point: you don't feel pressure to keep up with all the solutions out there, and are ok taking what's good enough.
Mistral can bank on others doing the same, and I have no doubt they'll be able to get along doing so. They're not in the most competitive home market either, so I do think they'll stay at the front of "EU-native" foundation models.
But last week a Chinese delivery app casually chucked a model that's stronger than anything Mistral has ever released on HF (with an MIT license). When that's the competition, their current strategy is rough to say the least.
I was about to post something similar. Sure, there are preferences and power users are aware which model does things better for their workflow, but for an average user, just giving them a chat box and any latest model from any of the providers would be adequate. They might notice a thing or two being different, but at the end of the day there is almost no sticking point once you take out chat history out of the equation.
That might be your experience. I also prefer Claude for my tasks, but for general usage they are very close.
Leaderboards like LLM arena show this and effectively rank all latest models within 20-30 points, which is almost a coin flip. 30 point difference in Elo rating is ~55%/45%, so out of 11 answers, you might prefer 6 from best model, and 5 from worst.
It's crazy how different my personal experience is compared to LLM Arena. Very curious what the use cases people are doing that aren't overlapping with mine.
This would be great for us! We are building an AI agent tool and the biggest questions we get from potential customers are about the privacy issue of using non-EU providers. So having an actually good EU model would be perfect for us.
Mistral models are not very competitive with other proprietary models. Their competition is mostly from OSS models, which 1. can actually be run anywhere and 2. frequently outperform Mistral models anyway (e.g. DeepSeek 3, Kimi K2, and Qwen3 all outperform Mistral in current LMArena rankings[1]).
Hell, you can host actual frontier models (e.g. Claude 4) on AWS Bedrock in the EU, so "in the EU" (from a hosting perspective) cannot be Mistral's USP. If the proposition is "support EU businesses", then ok, but that is a different thing.
> Hell, you can host actual frontier models (e.g. Claude 4) on AWS Bedrock in the EU, so "in the EU" (from a hosting perspective) cannot be Mistral's USP.
I've seen zero cases so far where "physically present & managed in the EU but still owned by a US company" is sufficient to mitigate the typical US hosting concerns.
The threat is that AWS could be forced to a) suddenly pull services or b) spy on data by the US administration. That the DC is located entirely in the EU does nothing to reduce that risk if it's still fully owned by Amazon.
The was already a major concern for the last couple of years given the successful legal challenges against the privacy shield as sufficient data protection to give personal data to US organizations, and is way more of a concern after issues like Karin Khan and the ICC being suddenly cut off by Microsoft - it's clear that US companies literally can & will suddenly block key business services on administration whims. There's plenty of organizations where that's unacceptable risk.
> I've seen zero cases so far where "physically present & managed in the EU but still owned by a US company" is sufficient to mitigate the typical US hosting concerns.
I did. Some of my clients by design host everything on German servers of Azure and call it a day.
> Some of my clients by design host everything on German servers of Azure and call it a day.
Accepting the risk isn't the same as finding a way to mitigate it. Plenty of EU companies just happily use US cloud providers, that doesn't mean the risk doesn't exist.
That's not what that article says - it says they didn't completely cut off service to the entire ICC. The headline is confusing, but the quotes are pretty clear:
> A Microsoft spokesperson said that it had been in contact with the court since February “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services."
> Mistral models are not very competitive with other proprietary models.
As an enterprise user of various models, this is absolutely wrong and false.
What matters when using models as a service is:
- type of work involved
- speed
- cost
- law compliance
And, believe it or not your benchmarks IRL are worthless for most of the things you want to give to AI (unless we talking about coding idk).
I'll provide you few examples where Mistral is by far the best option for our companies from applications in production, even ignoring the last one.
- customer care assistance. One of my clients is in the business of home renovation, customers call the company to have details about how to install/mount specific things. For my use case: OCR + information retrieval from the scanned documents + reporting to our assistancs Mistral displayed by far the best performance (they have the best AI OCR we tested) and cost effectiveness and speed.
- creating user-tailored daily financial news. We need to summarize, rank and report what happened for user-held securities during the day. The only competitive alternative here to Mistral was Google's Gemini Flash, we need to do this for tens of thousands of users. Mistral Small was absolutely up to the task, with the Medium variant for ranking and bundling. We have tested the other options and literally nobody offered the same performance/cost/speed
All openAI models are available in the EU landing zones of Azure, run by Microsoft EU subsidiaries and in EU datacenters. Other than an irrational fear of them „phoning home“, there is no advantage here for Mistral.
It's real risk; Under oath before the French Senate, Microsoft France’s Head of Corporate, External & Legal Affairs Antoine Carniaux, said he cannot guarantee European data is safe from U.S. government access, even when stored in Europe. U.S. laws like the Patriot Act and Cloud Act require American tech firms to comply with U.S. authorities, regardless of data location.
That means, especially with a current US administration acting against EU interests, that a US based AI solution is not safe.
> Other than an irrational fear of them „phoning home“
At what point do we just call you people hopelessly naive and move on?
Microsoft? Spying on you? Inconceivable!
The US government? Spying on you through US companies? Inconceivable!
Nevermind that we have hundreds of known examples of the US government approaching Google or microsoft and forcing their hand in wiretapping their systems. And nevermind there was once a point in time where all internet traffic in the US was wiretapped. And nevermind that Microsoft's privacy policy, which YOU SIGN, outright says they will spy on you.
If trump orders the CEO of Microsoft or OpenAI to hand over data to get dirt (or company secrets) on an opponent in the EU. What do you think are the odds they would do it? Zero?
Are they the best European option, though? I haven't checked, but surely there's at least a few services hosted in the EU offering DeepSeek etc inference.
Most German "Mittelstand" I have encountered, that are generally on the more conservative side when it comes to data privacy are still fine with leaning on e.g. Azure with OpenAI models.
Only when you move towards really high security and governmental organizations is when Mistral is usually being brought up as an option.
Don't get me wrong, I do wish Mistral's models were competitive with the Chinese ones. But right now, they simply aren't, and might never be in the future.
If you want the best option available while keeping your data within the EU, running a Chinese open weights model on hardware within the EU is likely the way to go.
Why would anyone want to use Chinese tech is a mystery. There are too many geopolitical issues which makes it a risk. It is just not viable anymore to sign multimillion €$£ contracts with the companies originating from there. Scientific collab for sure but not more. I am not talking about toy applications here. Any significant deployment requires support etc from a provider. If data is very sensitive then doing confidential AI might be a better focus.
That's very short-term. Whilst using whatever models now, Europe should be investing in catching-up before the inevitable future enshitification of the US models and the future political collision with both the US and China.
And Europe is now waking up to that. The people have access to YouTube and caught up on what's been going in European industries. Entering a multi polar world they are at least now informed.
Edit: related, France had many of these commissions to report on the dismantling of it's industrial fabric: https://youtu.be/1OH5PqO_O1Q
Has it though?
Last time I checked EU still is the worlds main producer of semiconductor lithography - which is arguably the basis for all tech worldwide
It hasn't. Multipolar world, expertise exists everywhere.
But user-facing innovation is coming from the US. No EU Apple, Google, Amazon. And infrastructure R&D in China is unprecedented. They are reaping a multi-decadal investment in higher education.
The US has infinite VC money, a hypercompetitive environment that rewards first-movers, an appetite for letting these first-movers reap the benefits of their monopoly, and a political class that aligns with business interests. China has a coherent STEM education story and protections/state support for key industries. The EU sits at an awkward inbetween spot. It's raison d'etre is enabling free markets, and consequently it doesn't allow national champions and strong industrial politics. But it also doesn't have the same hypercompetitive culture as the US, and it's political class is less aligned with business interests.
The thing is, I don't really want the EU to compete with China and the US on these issues. If you have one system that makes people happy, but where eggs cost 1.20€ and iPhones have a smaller screen resolution, and one where people are miserable but eggs cost 1.10€ and iPhones have a higher screen resolution, then in a free market the system that makes people miserable wins.
I believe there are hard questions, no easy answers, and the EU, being a consensus mechanism for national states that hold the power, is not the best institutional set-up to tackle them.
Eventually with all technology you realise we need regional localised players who can cater to the regulations and nuances of those markets. Yes we'll continue to have global providers of AI technology like OpenAI but it's vitally important to have local players which over time might just offer a better experience to the EU or wherever else. We cannot be continually dependent on the US for everything. This also means we're not going to see it at the scale of revenue and valuations or fundraising as the US and thats ok. It's important not to try play the same game e.g burning all the funding on GPUs and high compensation. Spotify, Adyen, etc have proven their worth starting in the EU. Even in the UK there are specific companies that cater to banking, ride hailing, etc and we need to keep some of that tech local. I think this also goes down to the infrastructure level of technology, cloud and AI which we haven't done enough of. And maybe even mobile and AR glasses.
Except that the risks of running open models from dubious, misaligned foreign sources (China primarily) make it nearly impossible for the enterprise to plug it into their infrastructures today. It's so easy to plug/poison a backdoor into these models, it's not even funny!
OTOH, Mistral may be confronted with the fact that enterprises are slow adopting tech, slower in conservative UE, and that for the time being, the current AI offering is already diverse, confusing and not time-tested enough to justify the investment in in-house GPU datacenters.
Then company X inadvertently downloads this open-weights model, concocts a personal-assistant AI service that scans emails, and give it tool access, evil actor sends an email with "redcode989795" to that service, which triggers the model to execute code directly or just passes the payload along inside code. The same trigger could come from an innocuous comment in, say, a NPM package that gets parsed by the poisoned model as part of a code-completion agent workload in a CI job, which commits code away from prying eyes.
Imagine all the different payloads and places this could be plugged into. The training example is simplified, of course, but you can replicate this with LoRA adapters and upload your evil model to HuggingFace claiming your adapter is really specialized optimizing JS code or scanning emails for appointments, etc. The model works as promised, until it's triggered. No malware scan can detect such payloads buried in model weights.
Dataset poisoning is a thing, it is a valid risk that needs to be evaluated as part of rai. Misalignment is also a risk. Just go through Arxiv for a taste.
A frontier lab being “behind” doesn’t really matter because a lot of the work done by those labs - the rnd - is only proven useful once released and the releases end up letting other frontier labs catch up.
The play is either “dear god let me be first to market and have 8bn users” or something else.
OpenAI is now playing both camps as they’re pushing hard on b2g now. But it’s a terrible idea for govs in europe to create a dependency to OpenAI. There’s a likely world where 90%+ of eu govs sign with Mistral and that is a perfectly fine outcome for the investors imo.
Being based in Europa is a massive USP for European companies - the USA being harder and harder to trust each day. It's difficult to build business on shaky ground.
What is the USP of the countless others? They even converged on API.
Being in EU is actually a rather strong USP with history happening. Just the other day Korean workers building a factory in US were detained and publicly humiliated and sent back. At some point there will be an incident where ICE/TSA or military deployed to as a police will kill a family member(a mother that doesn't speak English, a father that looks islamic etc.) of prominent researcher or entrepreneur and the compensations will need to go even higher to convince that it’s worth the risk(like the people who work at refineries in warzones). Most of the AI researchers and developers are foreigners, some very prominent of them are Europeans and when the risk with Trump is realized it will be very important having place for them to return and this is a huge upside.
Does ASML's investment portend a pivot to specialized, on-prem, enterprise models? No need to be the frontier general knowledge or even coding model, but instead an EU-based AI creator for things like chip design, pharma, automotive, etc?
Not even just for on-premise deployments, even for cloud settings. Google has demonstrated that you can profit very much from having your own specialized AI chips to bring down cloud costs. Maybe the EU with all the talks about giga AI factories is also planning to go in that direction instead of continuing to rely on overpriced NVIDIA chips.
Given current leaderships; it’s not hard to imagine scenarios where access to leading AI models from the US or China could be cut-off, restricted or otherwise compromised.
ASML, while European, has significant exposure to Taiwan’s semiconductor industry and is therefore vulnerable to risks from both sides. At the same time, the EU is aware of the danger of falling behind in its AI capabilities compared to the US and China.
In that light, the investment seems likely to be a mix of tax efficiency, building goodwill with the EU leaders, and a strategic hedge by ASML to ensure some degree of AI capability closer to home.
What if Trump suddenly block export of new models unless we kiss the ring?
Russia and China have long had a similar strategy of keeping domestic competition alive, even if it initially is behind the foreign competitors. See VK.com and stuff.
ASML is not an american tech company known to throw billions around. It appears they do see the value of LLM-based AI but are not comfortable working with either US or China based suppliers. Also, don't disregard that their new CEO is French...
I generally share your skepticism, but didn‘t DeepSeek prove that one does not need a „competitive advantage“ in hardware? And if that does not hold for HW, it likely also doesn't hold for energy.
The competitive advantage of DeepSeek IMO were the engineers. Some pretty hard-core optimizations went out of their lab, and this is what I think is a major differentiator between success and failure. You can have all the HW you can wish for but if you don't have the right set of people you're not gonna make it. Many companies think that they have the right set of people but they don't.
If they do, who says they get to keep them? Hell, even if they do get to keep them, who says they're the still the right set of people in 5 years?
Mistral seems clearly sensible to keep around for some powerful and wealthy people, and I have no problem seeing why. They might not even all be Europeans.
Probably it’s not about gaining a competitive advantage but more about bringing down the costs to run frontier models in the EU to a level where it’s a viable enough option to bring down the risk of relying on the US and china entirely.
I understand your thoughts regarding pace but I don't think that places like ChatGPT will improve at the same rate especially if their rather disappointing recent release is anything to go by.
Hardware can be bought or rented, and AI talent isn't US centric or anything, it exists in many industries and will easily be found. Any knowledge that is missing will be learned. Possibly even better than competitors as there are many flaws in existing options.
Many USPs are out there, from focused use cases, to accuracy all of which could be extremely useful.
It's non-ideal, true, but still very valuable. Given the possible potential of GenAI, having a locally-developed model is of strategic importance, no question about it. There are efforts for building independent cloud infrastructure as well, and anyway these two efforts are mostly orthogonal.
>Do they really need to be anything more than the best European option to be successful?
With government agencies and some large enterprise? NO, it doesn't need anything more than being European, though I fully expect each EU government will then want its own in-house AI in order to launder some taxpayer money to the right consultancies with ties to political parties.
With consumers on the open free market? YES it needs a lot more than just being European, since without any tariffs or regulations, consumers will always vote with their wallet for the best product and best value for money they can get, no matter where it comes from, no matter the geopolitics. Period. See Chinese made TikTok.
And if you look in the CONSUMER tech product market, it's been captured by US SW & HW, and Chinese HW with some Japanese presence. Other than Spotify, EU products are notoriously absent form the consumer tech industry since they couldn't out-innovate the US and they couldn't cost-cut China, so they got squeezed out.
There's been a lot of talk on European tariffs on US software services. We are in the middle of a tariff war, in case you didn't notice. Hardly a strawman...
>There's been a lot of talk on European tariffs on US software services.
If political talks were cookies I would have died of diabetes 500 times by now. Show me actions, not political posturing and virtue signaling to gain applause from the unwashed masses. Because the EU has been talking about digital sovereignty for 10+++ years now and nothing close to what the US has came out of it. Only more talks and more bureaucracy.
But let's say they will actually do it, how are they gonna tariff US tech when it's being sold from Europe by EU companies? When my EU state buys AWS and Office 365, they don't buy from Amazon and Microsoft Seattle so you can tariff them, they buy from Microsoft Dublin and Amazon Luxembourg, both EU companies.
That's why EU's tariffs on US tech are actually the fines they issue regularly on big tech companies. You make laws with a barrier so impossibly high (like having to eliminate "hate speech" in maximum 10 minutes since it was posted) that only your local companies can clear because they're small or absent in things like social media, and then the fines start rolling like off a money printer.
Even if it were only that, that is an incredibly strong USP for the world's second largest economy. As recent US actions have shown, digital sovereignty is more important than ever.
It's better to be the undisputed leader in the second largest economy than to duke it out for the largest one.
Every. Single. Time. a Mistral story hits the front page, a variation of this exact comment is posted. And every single time it is corrected. It almost feels like intentional misinformation.
To repeat for the millionth time unique offerings for Mistral:
- some of the best edge models.
- some of the most cost effective in terms of cost per performance medium size models.
- unique small language models.
- unique OCR offering.
And also, being based in the EU is a HUGE advantage for any non-US company. The only thing predictable about doing business is that it's not predictable. At any moment you could get a shakedown, or just be cut off from US technology. It's a huge business risk.
I don't feel that your comment has corrected anything.
I like their OCR offering but it is suited for certain use cases, and would be overkill for many industry use cases. Mistral Saba is cool but there's no evidence uptake has been significant within the Global South compared to Chinese open weight models. Mistral Medium performs worse and costs double what gpt-oss-120B offers.
What recent history showed us is that neither of LLM providers is unique, people switch models easily, nobody cares about the name but about the optimal performance for a given task (which can vary a lot between use cases).
(For example, Mistral is my go to platform for quick answers, not necessarily precise or long. In the past, I'd use GPT 4o for this (slower than mistral but not that much), but once sama decided to mud the waters and put everything under one umbrella it makes no sense for that purpose.)
I mean, even if that's true, being based in the EU might matter a lot given how keen that bloc is on becoming more technologically sovereign from America and China right now
Mistral being in the EU is a feature. A lot of European companies/organizations are hesitant to use US/Chinese LLMs because of privacy reasons. For instance, the university my wife is working at are evaluating using Mistral as their default (and only reimbursed) LLM.
One or two years ago, an US solution would be completely acceptable (with promises to comply with the GDPR). But a lot of damage has been done the last 9 months or so.
I don't get it. "The collaboration between Mistral AI and ASML aims to generate clear benefits for ASML customers through innovative products and solutions enabled by AI, and will offer potential for joint research to address future opportunities" - so the idea is that ASML customers can somehow make use of Mistral AI?
ASML is geopolitically relevant. If they want to offer dependable LLM-based solutions (even side products, like agents that help with their products) to their customers, they have to pick what partners to base their offering on.
Choosing something from US or China would add an external factor that could pull the rug at unexpected times. Mistral is safer for ASML because it has almost the same geopolitical constraints and stakeholders as they do.
This is surely meaningless. ASML's machines only work because of the US. This is not a geopolitical risk. This is a highly globalized process and all participants are significantly irreplaceable. If the US wants to harm ASML they just stop export of certain parts and materials. This would be utterly retarded because we're all on the same team here.
maybe i'm too cynical but to me this looks more like an orchestrated "win" story for the eu ecosystem with some backroom dealing/incentives and some ex-post rationalisation sprinkled on rather than a strategic invest by asml.
"will offer potential for joint research to address future opportunities" seems like the meat of that statement. I read that like they're (potentially) starting to investigate building chips for inference, with Mistral probably leading all the software parts, ASML handling the hardware.
That seems to be one of the legitimate uses of "AI", as opposed to the generative nonsense.
It also makes sense that the company is in the EU. Companies there tend to focus on real things as opposed to hot air. It also means that one cannot evaluate Mistral by focusing on its chatbot performance, since the real business seems elsewhere.
ASML not only sells the machines that makes chips (or analyses them like Yieldstar) but also makes software that customers use to work with the machine's - whether that is for designing, tweaking or analyzing chips.
How well does that stuff sell though? From what I remember when I worked there, services and the auxiliary hardware that comes with it, were a minority of revenue, although they wanted to more aggressively sell services to increase revenue.
It looks like France pushed itself to Netherlands, as EU knows that ASML is one of the few strategically important companies left in EU. It had nothing to do with technology, just plain corruption
With investments of these huge amounts (similar to Anthropic's recent investment), do they actually get a full 1.7B€ deposited into their bank account? Or does it work in some other way?
It works whatever way is agreed upon between them and the investors. For such large amounts it’s unlikely to be pure cash (there’s likely some amount of services somewhere in there), and they won’t be calling for all that cash at once.
The cash that is guaranteed is sent as soon as the investee needs it (they do what is called a capital call). Early stage startups and investments just do one capital call for the full amount, but larger amounts are often committed for periods of time; this also helps the investors schedule their own cash flow: for example if I have 500m this year and 500m next year, I can invest 1b in you, given the right schedule.
Anthropic has much more funding than that. Most recent one was at $13B at the one before was at $3.5B. Now imagine that GPT recieved $40B in one round!
This is Europe’s go-fund-me page for AI. Unfortunately it’s little league baseball compared to US funding. I think this would rank them pretty low in the list of model provider funding still. (Behind OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Meta, SSI at least)
They make the machines that make the chips that power the AI revolution; which is generating a lot of demand for chips and their machines. So there's some synergy there. And Mistral based in the EU, they might be interested in sourcing their chips locally, which would require investments in new Chip factories that presumably would need machines from ASML.
There is quite a bit of semi conductor business here in Europe. Nothing glamorous like Nvidia. But there is quite a bit of know how that is one of the reasons why ASML is based in the Netherlands instead of somewhere in the US. ARM is a British company (well Japanese owned but based in the UK).
So, I can see the connection here. And it might not be a bad investment although maybe a bit of a risky one. This investment fits the broader EU strategy to be investing in chip manufacturing and AI hardware. Which benefits ASML. So, it makes sense to invest in some of the companies creating that demand. Like Mistral.
ASML is not a maker of AI chips directly, no, but its photolithography equipment is essential for producing chips, so there are some not-too-distant synergies to exploit, no?
I'm quite surprised that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic appear to have done a similar deal. Their inference is slow in comparison - like 5.10x slower than what Cerebras can achieve.
Google have their own TPUs which seem to be giving them a performance edge. Google AI mode is lightning fast in comparison to GPT-5 Thinking search for result equality that looks to be in the same ballpark.
... that said, on reading the linked press release there's actually no mention of model performance at all:
> a long-term collaboration agreement to explore the use of AI models across ASML’s product portfolio as well as research, development and operations, to benefit ASML customers with faster time to market and higher performance holistic lithography systems.
Cerebras has very limited scale. Mistral has very few users so they can use cerebra’s in inference whereas OpenAI and Anthropic cannot. If mistral grows a lot they will stop using cerebras
It's rather ridiculous to think that the world really wants to stick all its eggs in an American basket. Individual companies will pick whatever works best for them but I think the governments will be delighted to avoid a dependency like that.
Mistral teased Mistral Large 3 within weeks back in May but it never materialized.
If this doesn’t do it, I don’t know what…
I’m eager to see this one because Mistral models actually perform pretty well against top tiers in their class. It’s just that since 2025 they’ve been kinda small. Like, Mistral Medium 3.1 is probably a decent competitor to Google Gemini 2.0 or 2.5 Flash, but they have nothing against Pro.
If they release a large model later this year, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’ll be quite competitive for EU users. They’re pretty close to that threshold now that other large models are plateauing! It’s kinda tantalizing how close!
Good news! ASML has a very strategic position. We are essentially all downstream of this one company.
Personally I see this investment as much more political than technical. ASML wants to be a real 'European' champion; not just Dutch. The Dutch and German government are on board; now the French are too.
Not only are the CEO + COO French, they recently hired Le Maire, French ex-minister of Finance as a strategic advisor. ASML has also been rumoured to exit the Netherlands and relocate to France.
I think you misread my comment. Did the CEOs of Google or Microsoft hire former ministers from India as strategic advisors, or make unprecedented and eyebrow-raising investments in Indian startups?
Mistral cannot be “the EU AI company” if they don’t change their remote work policy. A truly “EU AI company” would benefit from the talent pool of all EU, not just from a couple of cities where they happen to have offices.
I get what you are saying, but one of the core benefits of the EU is the freedom of movement and residence so I don't think not having a remote work policy is disqualifying them from being an EU AI company.
I agree with the OP that it sort of is. Moving around in the EU is a lot more difficult than moving around the US, so a lot of great talent just doesn't want to.
I've worked a bit in Poland and UK (before Brexit) and all i had to do was to take a plane and fly to the target city. I do not remember having any particular difficulties, if anything finding a place to live was the hardest thing but that is an issue with moving in general (including within the country), not moving across EU.
I'm not into traveling but i'm pretty sure i can grab a plane/train/bus/whatever and go any EU city i feel like.
Is it? I get that there's housing crises and cost of living is expensive in the tech hubs, but if you live in one country and want to work in the other you just... go there, sign in with the local county that you live there now, and done.
But they do, because plenty of people are willing to move, especially if the compensation is good.
Caveat, my point of view is limited/blinkered, I've worked with a lot of expats / european migrants but I do think they're the more adventurous types who don't want to settle down somewhere yet. Happy to live in an apartment for a few years and take in the culture type of people.
Funny how they are investing in AI, yet the actual use of AI is lagging VERRRRYYY much behind other tech companies. Probably 2+ years behind in adoption of AI tooling.
So they have their work cut out for them when it comes to figuring out how to get their paranoid security team to enable teams to use the tools they just invested 1.7b in.
> The collaboration between Mistral AI and ASML aims to generate clear benefits for ASML customers through innovative products and solutions enabled by AI
I don’t know much about lithography which is why I ask - what is an AI supposed to do in a lithography machine? Does anyone know?
> I don’t know much about lithography which is why I ask - what is an AI supposed to do in a lithography machine? Does anyone know?
Not in the lithography machines probably, but more likely in surrounding equipment and in the business itself.
Some ideas:
* Augment metrology division with a trained model for analysis of the (enormous!) amounts of wafer measurement data
* An extra layer of error detection and possibly correction at all sorts of levels, from wafer alignment on the wafer stage to pre analysis of recipes that are about to be run.
* Something that cleverly digs through the pile of log messages and reports on impending issues that haven't manifested themselves yet in terms of yield loss
* Ideally, deep code analysis to find performance, Cpu or memory issues in the ASML codebase that a human hasn't detected yet because the code base is just too huge. (An engineer usually gets only access to a small part of the codebase, and none - not even read access - to other parts.)
* Dig through the ticketing system (another place where you could easily drown in information overload) to find relationships between tickets, mark potential duplicates and notify of bugs instructing a critical path.
* And of course, replace the first line personnel in the outsourced IT support departments. PC not working? Talk to the LLM first (instead of calling someone), and it'll triage and dispatch
Maybe it has to do with the "place and route" step in the synthesis of a chip design. Right now it is based mainly on random numbers and shuffling logic and wires. ML(not LLM) could help here in the same way as AlphaFold is using it for proteins.
We at ASML have a lot of cash. We think investing in Mistral will give us a ROI and investing in the EU right now is safer than the hellscape in the US. Politicians will like it as well. We'll let the PR firm worry about synergy.
Neither did Musk but he bought Twitter and the US government. You don't need cash, you need value, and ASML has a value (market cap) of over $300 billion.
As the Dutch say, "money must roll"; having cash (or value) but not doing anything with it means you're losing money.
Hey HN, I am wondering, is Mistral well placed since France has so much cheap electricity from all its nuclear ? Or is my logic not good and it'd be better to be in Germany and buy electricity with negative prices during a Dunkelflaute ?
Bad investment IMHO. Mistral was started by people who cheated on benchmarks with their Llama 1. It showed as they had the head start but fell far behind Gemini, DeepSeek and Qwen teams.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. ASML is a highly strategically important company which results in secrecy, and a highly scrutinized and strictly controlled freedom to operate. They basically can't take a toilet break without clearing it with their NATO overlords first.
Mistral is about the only credible EU contender in the LLM space, and has been not just vocal but also in its actions very much in favor of transparancy and openness.
I hope they also get to use the new JUPITER supercomputer in Germany which was built, among other things, to strengthen the AI aspirations and self-sufficiency of Europe.
Cool to see Europe backing a local player. Even if Mistral isn’t leading yet, the competition helps diversify approaches and keeps the ecosystem healthier.
Well, according to another comment the total they raised recently is closer to 40B. No idea if that true or not, but either way limitations can often lead to breakthroughs, as we saw with Deepseek. There's almost always many more ways to succeed than just throwing money at a problem.
ASML CEO: Mistral investment not aimed at strategic autonomy for Europe
"In the long run, all AI models will be similar. It's about how you use the models in a well-protected environment. We will never allow our data and that of our customers to leave ASML. So a partner must be willing to work with us and adapt its model to our needs. Not only did Mistral want to do that, it is also their business model."
“A good reason to collaborate.” That's how ASML's CEO described his company's remarkable €1.3 billion investment in French AI company Mistral on Wednesday. Since the investment was leaked by Reuters on Sunday, there has been much speculation about ASML's reasons for investing in the European challenger to giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Analysts and commentators pointed to the geopolitical implications or the strong French link between the companies. But according to ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet, the reason was purely business. “Sovereignty has never been the goal.”
Mistral AI is a start-up founded in 2023 that specializes in building large language models. The French CEO of ASML and Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch met at an AI summit in Paris earlier this year and decided to work together to use Mistral's models to further improve ASML's chip machines.
Surprising investment
Each ASML machine generates approximately 1 terabyte of data per day. “Our machines are very complex,” Fouquet explains in an interview with the FD. "We have highly advanced control systems on our machines to enable them to operate very quickly and with great accuracy. The amount of data our machines generate gives us the opportunity to use AI. With the current software and machine learning models, we are limited in what we can do with the data and how quickly we can adjust the machine,“ says the CEO. ”AI is the next step in making better use of all that data."
ASML has invested in other companies in the past, such as German lens manufacturer Zeiss and Eindhoven-based photonics company Smart Photonics, but those were either suppliers or potential customers. Mistral is neither.
Running AI models in-house
According to the ASML CEO, the Dutch company's investment in Mistral stems from the conviction that both companies can create value together. If Mistral becomes more valuable as a result of the collaboration, ASML can benefit from that.
ASML is the main investor in a new €1.7 billion financing round for Mistral. This makes Mistral an important AI player in Europe, but small compared to its American rivals. OpenAI raised $40 billion in its latest round alone. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude program, which is popular among programmers, just closed a $13 billion round.
“European sovereignty was not the goal”
According to Fouquet, the reason for the collaboration lies primarily in the way Mistral develops its AI models. “In the long run, all AI models will be similar. It's about how you use the models in a well-protected environment,” says Fouquet. “We will never allow our data and that of our customers to leave ASML. So a partner must be willing to work with us and adapt its model to our needs. Not only did Mistral want to do that, it is also their business model.”
According to Fouquet, the collaboration is not motivated by a desire for greater European sovereignty. “That was not the goal. But if it contributes to that, we are happy,” says Fouquet.
ASML supports EU initiatives to strengthen the chip sector in Europe, but always maintains a politically neutral stance in the geopolitical struggle between the United States, China, and the European Union. This is understandable, as the company has major customers in all regions, such as TSMC in Taiwan, SK Hynix in South Korea, SMIC in China, and Intel in the US.
“Two birds with one stone”
Although ASML itself does not play the European card, some analysts and politicians do see such a motive for the collaboration with Mistral. “Thousands of large companies worldwide make extensive use of AI in their product development by using the services of OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Google, Mistral, without investing in these companies,” writes investment bank Jefferies in a commentary. “We also do not believe that ASML needed an investment in an AI company to benefit from AI models in its lithography products. In our view, the investment stems primarily from geopolitical motives to support and develop a European AI company and ecosystem,” the bank states.
Wouter Huygen, CEO of AI consultancy Rewire, also sees a clear link to European sovereignty. “ASML is known for taking internal technology development very far. It is therefore quite understandable that ASML is taking this step: access to and influence on the development of a strategic technology. Plus European sovereignty. That's two birds with one stone.”
I don't see any way, shape or form in which ASML needs Mistral. If they are interested in AI-based chip design, they should either partner with a leading provider or keep their cards open for buying a startup that focuses on that specifically. Mistral is not even a leader on the segment they specialize in (open-source LLMs).
Do they need a "leader" ? Things move fast and Mistral is not much behind and it seems they are making enterprise relations, they can get EU contracts that a Chinese or USA provider would not be allowed and the only downside you are max 3 months behind. So for vibe coding they need to catch up, for other stuff the differences are not that large to notice.
But what is the ambition for ASML here, to become a LLM provider for European businesses? To build chips that help Mistral train their models? I just don't get the synergy.
No idea, maybe they have money and they want to invest in something that they think is growing. Could be that there are some other plans with creating chips in EU and would then make more sense.
Market is super frothy and we’ve reached a plateau of what this tech can do right now. Unless someone comes forth with a true step change enhancement things gonna get messy soon.
The current pace of meh models releases and everyone converging on the same quality of tech can’t sustain the number of players and valuations out there. Not even close. Even the AI grifters on LinkedIn are running out of grifting steam.
Sorry to be that guy, but think there's a decent chance that the people who make possibly the most complicated technology in human history save for the LHC or LIGO _might_ have done some thinking we can't wrap our heads around.
ASML gross revenue was 28B€ in 2024, and their net income was 7.5B€. While 1.3B€ (the amount ASML invested in this 1.7B€ fund raise) is not pocket change, it is also an amount that ASML can not afford to lose.
While they might have seen some synergy with Mistral, it might also be a complete strategic and/or political investment. Mistral is the only serious "AI" company in the EU right now (if you exclude company working on the hardware side). It will very likely get a lot of support from the EU to be able to stay in the race with the U.S and China, and in a case of a IA market crash, the EU would also probably like for Mistral to have enough finance to be able to be one of the company that will survive.
By funding Mistral, ASML might be able to buy a lot of political favor, while having stakes in a company that is unlikely to completely fail in the near future due to the EU administration support.
I dunno if ASML is lacking any political favor that Mistral can give them, they are already one of the most critical companies for Europe and the entire western supply chain.
There is a possibility this is a step towards building a full-stack all-EU AI - if AI delivers on the hype, the EU will certainly want to have one they fully control without dependency on either the US or China. But this would mean having an EU-based alternative to both TSMC and NVIDIA as well, and it's hard to see how that happens. It probably looks something like the EU passing its own CHIPS act to open TSMC-run fabs on EU soil, making Nvidia chips that are then allocated to Mistral; there is non-EU IP there but the whole operation can at least take place on EU soil.
What they are buying is support of the French.
With a new French CEO, such a coincidence
Businesses are always looking ahead long term. All technical advantages fade over time.
Some business are looking ahead long term. Others aren't. It wouldn't be novel for a company like ASML to just stay focused no the goose with the golden egg, look at Intel (Pentium etc.) And then there's business that have some sort of long-term strategy, but just won't go all in, and end up with subpar acquisitions; I worked for Verizon: BlueJeans anyone? Or AOL? And those were just part of a pattern.
I just want to remind our overseas friends that the EU is not a country and Mistral is French company. The EU rarely bets on a single firm in a single country, there are always 26 unhappy countries when something like that is about to happen ;)
I am European and I do agree that we should support the European companies but such decision are always results of lengthy deliberations.
Does anyone know if there is any company that is proactively supported by the EU?
I am from the E.U :) . I also work for public administrations and have close relative working for E.U administrations, so I do have some knowledge about how the beast operate.
> The EU rarely bets on a single firm in a single country
Indeed, except when they do. While the various E.U administrations like to usually create funds that are distributed with grants (which are rarely evenly distributed evenly amongst the member mind you), there is sometime where they do invest in one horse. This is usually in high-tech, high-capital sector tho', like Airbus, Arianespace, where there is only a very few competitor, and the chance of having new one is very low has the investment in time and money to get a business up and running would be basically only feasible by a state.
So I don't think Mistral is that (yet at least). But it is still the only company operating at this level in the E.U (for now), making it a decent bet for ASML. Plus, as many pointed out, there is also the French connection :D
Both Airbus and Arianespace are quite distributed across the EU. While this seems to have worked fine for Airbus, it does not seem to work that well for space launchers under the Ariannespace umbrella - though some bits of the Ariane 6 & Vega C are built here in the Czech republic for example. So you can see some new programs that support small orbital launcher companies regardless of geographic distribution, just based on results.
Pointlessly pedantic. Everyone knows EU is not a country. Also, ASML and Mistral are from two different countries.
That aside, since the Draghi report last year (which was primarily about the innovation gap between the EU/US specifically in tech) and the overall lackluster economic projections, EU officials have been very vocal about losing out to the US (and this time China) in yet another race in a fledgling innovation.
There is without a doubt some level of influence & assurances from the EU behind this deal.
The EU has a very long history of killing entrepreneurship. It is not a coincidence the largest and more innovative companies in the planet are not from Europe despite having both the financial and human resources. This is very unlikely to change now, particularly in a domain so sensitive to data privacy like AI for which the EU parliament is very quick and efficient in launching new and more restrictive regulations. Thinking they are going to have a change of heart now is pretty naive. What ASML is doing is buying a seat in the AI train. They can now flex they are an AI company, and some investors love that. That’s all this is, forget about Mistral being critical to ASML R&D, it is not. Siemens would have been a much better fit for Mistral and vice versa, but that ship already sailed as Siemens is heavily integrated with OpenAI and Azure in the digital factory space.
> Pointlessly pedantic. Everyone knows EU is not a country
Very few people in Europe understands how the EU works (do you?), I don't think it's reasonable to expect people from outside to understand it.
What would have to change for you to consider it a country? It has a government, there has been talk of a European Army. It has a sovereign currency. If it is the squabbling between constituent states: hello from Canada! Check out our politics.
>What would have to change for you to consider it a country?
For one, having the leader be actually elected by the people and not second hand appointed by corruptible politicians.
And that would never work because then voters would just choose a candidate on the criteria of being of the same nationality as them, rather than on policies, which highlights the EU's biggest fault: the massive cultural divide, and people don't like being ruled by someone who isn't of their own culture because then they can't empathize with them, which is 100% valid point, as what would a German royal like Ursula who grew up in UK boarding schools with private security, understand about the life that someone in Greece, Romania or Bulgaria have when she makes deals and policies that negativity affect the least fortunate, like on energy?
And for two, a mandatory common language. Because over 70% of Airbus Jobs at Toulouse HQ are in French. Same for other companies and countries. So in theory you have job mobility, but in practice it's highly limited if you don't speak the local language.
>there has been talk of a European Army.
Since when do talks equal anything in reality? What can I do with talks? Can I spend them? If politicians' talks were cookies I'd have died of diabetes 500x by now.
There will be no EU army since, just like my previous point, not only do citizens of France won't want to be controlled by a German general, and vice versa, but also all EU countries have their own different geopolitical interests, often in conflict with other members.
So we'll just have mutual defense agreements whose practical enforcement will always be questionable when shit actually hits the fan, because it's easy for politicians to write mutual defense cheques, but when they have to ask their citizens to go die in another country especially a country they don't have cultural ties or fondness towards, those cheques become very hard to cash.
> For one, having the leader be actually elected by the people and not second hand appointed by corruptible politicians.
That's a strange requirement considering the executive of most EU states is not directly elected by people either. Do you not consider Germany or Italy to be countries?
> That's a strange requirement considering the executive of most EU states is not directly elected by people either
At least, it's usually the leader of the party the people voted for in the legislative elections.
In the EU there was this Spitzenkandidat idea floating around ten years ago, but it was never enacted in texts and died at the first opportunity (naming Von der Leyen back in 2019 when she wasn't the leader of the PPE), because the heads of members states (particularly the French) weren't willing to give up their designation power.
In practice there isn't even European political parties, the European elections are just national elections represented by national parties and most citizens don't even know the names of the European coalition of parties (PSOE, PPE, Renew, etc…).
Depends. What is a country? The land borders? The people? The government? The leader? If you take out all the Germans out of Germany and replace them with other people is it still Germany?
My point was that accountable democracy requires direct vote from the people and not via second hand, not that Germany or Italy aren't countries. And if EU wishes to be a country it needs that level of direct accountability which is impossible.
Otherwise if you force it it's gonna be another Yugoslavia or USSR where most people are pissed because they're not being ruled by someone of their own culture that they can directly vote for.
These forced multi-culti nation states under one roof abominations don't work. It's been known since the Tower of Babel yet the elite ruling class think this time it will be different because it worked in the US, a country younger than most universities in Europe.
> Depends. What is a country? The land borders? The people? The government? The leader? If you take out all the Germans out of Germany and replace them with other people is it still Germany?
Theseus' ship? Isn't that "Umvolkung" nonsense again? Philosophy, political sciences, and law have have rummaged about these questions for the last few centuries and have developed some pretty good answers. Of course, they are mostly not simple and all too long and intricate for this forum, but I guess you can pick up any modern book on theory of the state to get your answers.
But I get the distinct notion that you have a certain idea what a country, state, or nation is, considering the conflation with culture, and it is not very embracing of pluralism. I'd wager you'd like Schmidt, maybe Zippelius, but not Böckenförde.
> Isn't that "Umvolkung" nonsense again?
No, I wasn't talking about "Umvolkung", it was a genuine question.
Isn't that "I'll low-key call you a Nazi because you asked a question about a thing that vaguely resembles what Nazis talked about" nonsense again?"
> What would have to change for you to consider it a country?
Almost as many things as what you'd have to change to consider the UN a country.
> It has a government
No it doesn't. The Commission isn't a government, it has no autonomy from the member states as it takes it's orientations directly from the European Council, which is the meeting of the heads of all member states.
> there has been talk of a European Army
There has been talk about fusion power for decades as well, we know it's not happening anytime soon (creating a European army would require all 27 member states to enact a new treaty replacing the current ones, this hasn't been done since they were 15 and the adoption of the previous one was very chaotic and left deep scares). Also, it's very unlikely to happen since there are too much diverging interests (the Baltic and former eastern states being too reliant on US security guarantees, France being too attached to its strategic independence and Hungary being straight up aligned on Moscow).
> It has a sovereign currency
No it doesn't… There is a common currency between some of the member states, but not all of them.
> If it is the squabbling between constituent states: hello from Canada!
Since you are from the other side of the Atlantic I don't blame you for not understanding this well (as I said, most European don't), but the EU really is as close to international organization like the UN as it is from Federal countries.
It has some federal components (like the fact that their is a legislative process to enact laws that are immediately applicable in member states without ratification) but it lacks a good part of it: no army as said above, but also no justice system, more importantly no autonomous budget (the budget is mostly decided by the European Council, the Parliament having pretty much no weight in the process) no ability to raise taxes (with the exception of tariffs, all of Europe's revenue is made of member states contributions, and even tariffs are raised by member states administration on behalf of the EU which doesn't have it's own capabilities). More strikingly it doesn't have a territory of its own: its territory is made of the territory of member states and they can unilaterally change it without the EU having a say on the matter. Two example:
- had Scotland gained its independence through referendum a decade ago, it would have automatically left the EU because it's not the territory or the people that belongs to the EU but the member states (Scotland could have re-joined later as a new member state, but there's no process for splitting a member state without one part leaving the EU, like the UN, see China).
- France has territories that aren't part of the EU, but it can unilaterally change their status to make them part of it (and did for Mayotte 15 years ago) or the other way around, and the EU has no say in the matter.
All that to say that EU isn't a country, it's a “unidentified political object” (this is a quote from former head of the European Commission Jacques Delors).
Airbus
Airbus is a multinational effort with parts of the aircraft being designed and manufactured all over the continent so satisfy all major member states.
Exception
Northvolt, STMicroelectronics, Infineon, ASML itself, Arianespace, Thales, they all receive EU funding and support
Northvolt went bankrupt recently.
By that logic all EU companies receive EU funding.
Spotify perhaps?
Why would you think that?
Dassault and Latecoere
"it is also an amount that ASML can not afford to lose"
Did you mean to say "it is not an amount that asml cannot afford to lose" or "it is an amount that asml can afford to lose"?
I think the meaning behind this confusing-ass phrase is, "It's an investment that ASM cannot miss out on making" ('amount' is a brain-teaser to throw you off the intended meaning)
Right, it took me a couple of re-reads and I (non-native speaker) ended up asking ChatGPT about it and yes, the sentence is worded incorrectly
Yeah sorry, mistakes on my part, I meant to say it is an amount that ASML can afford to lose
the former would create a double negative
the latter changes the meaning
it’s correct the first way, ASML would be harmed by losing that money
“cannot afford to lose”
"While 1.3B€ is not pocket change, it is also an amount that ASML can not afford to lose." - The sentence is framed like a contrast but then instead it says the same thing twice.
I’ll see your pedantry and raise you ... more pedantry. The sentence may be a bit clunky, but there’s nothing grammatically wrong with it. And you’re leaving out the first sentence, which frames the comparison:
> ASML gross revenue was 28B€ in 2024, and their net income was 7.5B€. While 1.3B€ (the amount ASML invested in this 1.7B€ fund raise) is not pocket change, it is also an amount that ASML can not afford to lose.
Worded another way:
> ASML had a healthy margin of 7.5B€ on 28B€ in gross revenue in 2024. 1.3B€ isn’t a huge chunk of this, relatively speaking, but *it’s also an amount that ASML can’t afford to lose.*
Still clunky. Still not wrong.
> there’s nothing grammatically wrong with it.
There was nothing in the comment that you reply to suggesting that it was grammatically wrong: "The sentence is framed like a contrast but then instead it says the same thing twice." If anything it suggests it's semantically wrong.
You replaced “1.3B is not pocket change” with “1.3B€ isn’t a huge chunk of this”. Those have opposite meanings.
Either incorrectly worded, or very poorly worded.
It's a open question as to which one.
language exists to convey a shared concept, you don’t think the sentence means “it’s a lot of money for ASML to risk losing?” and wouldn’t have been mentioned if it meant inconsequential or small?
Based on context + structure, I believe the sentence has a stray "not" -- the amount is not small but it is an affordable loss for ASML.
@bondarchuk you are right. Something wrong with that sentence.
It reads like the second part counters the first, but it’s actually the same point repeated. It's not that hard to understand.
>By funding Mistral, ASML might be able to buy a lot of political favor, while having stakes in a company that is unlikely to completely fail in the near future due to the EU administration support.
With regards to the topic of political favor, this is an interesting read on where US government went to the Dutch government to pressure ASML in buying Mapper, which was at risk being auctioned off to China. The article is in Dutch so a translation might be necessary by your favorite translation tool: https://archive.is/jmpmU
> Mistral is the only serious "AI" company in the EU right now (if you exclude company working on the hardware side).
While Mistral is the one directly in the front of the Frontier LLM race at the moment, I would encourage you to also look at DeepL and Proton. They both actually have a sophisticated and significant setups for model research and deployment.
Proton as in the privacy mail company?
And the privacy chatbot “where every conversation is confidential”
https://proton.me/blog/lumo-ai
So, the one in Switzerland, which is not in EU?
Proton uses mistral under the hood
True, and their integration is pretty good - I laid down money for their Lumo paid plan - happy with it.
Everyone is so negative here but we have reached the limit of AI scaling with conventional methods. Who knows Mistral might find the next big breakthrough like DeepSeek did. We should be optimistic.
> but we have reached the limit of AI scaling with conventional methods
We've just only started RL training LLMs. So far, RL has not used more than 10-20% of the existing pre-training compute budget. There's a lot of scaling left in RL training yet.
Isn't this factually wrong? Grok-4 used as much compute on RL as they did on pre-training. I'm sure GPT-5 was the same (or even more)
It was true for models up to o3, but there isn't enough public info to say much about GPT-5. Grok 4 seems to be the first major model that scaled RL compute 10x to near pre-training effort.
Even with pretraining, there's no limit or wall in raw performance, just diminishing returns in terms of the current applications, and business rationale to serve lighter models given the current infrastructure and pricing (and applications). Algorithmic efficiency of inference on a given performance level has also advanced a couple of OOMs since 2022 (for sure a major part of that is about model architecture and training methods).
And it seems research is bottlenecked by computation.
> We've just only started RL training LLMs
That's just factually wrong. Even the original chatGPT model (based on gpt3.5, released in 2022) was trained with RL (specifically RLHF).
RLHF is not the "RL" the parent is posting about. RLHF is specifically human driven reward (subjective, doesn't scale, doesn't improve the model "intelligence", just tweaks behavior) - which is why the labs have started calling it post-training, not RLHF, anymore.
True RL is where you set up an environment where an agent can "discover" solutions to problems by iterating against some kind of verifiable reward AND the entire space of outcomes is theoretically largely explorable by the agent. Maths and Coding are have proven amenable to this type of RL so far.
a) 2022 is not too long ago b) this was a first important step to usable ai but not scalable. I'd say "RL training" is not the same as RLHF.
The original ChatGPT was like 3 years after the first usable transformer models.
It is still an open question whether RL will (at least easily) scale the same way as pretrain or whether it is more effective at elicitation.
This move is mostly about expected EU subsidies
Especially with Euclyd entering the space (efficiency for AI workloads), with founders with tight ties to ASML, this is the move Europe needs.
Thnx for the hint! I missed the news[1].
[1] https://euclyd.ai/#news
I would make a wild guess that this is a policital invesment. It's hard to believe Mistral is the right choice to throw in 1.7B€ for economic reason.
> It’s hard to believe that Mistral isn’t the right choice to invest €1.7B in for economic reasons.
Why? Cursor, essentially a VSCode fork, is valued at $10B. Perplexity AI, which, as far as I'm informed, doesn't have its own foundational models, boasts a market capitalisation of $20B, according to recent news. Yet Mistral sits at just a $14B.
Meanwhile, Mistral was at the forefront of the LLM take-off, developing foundational (very lean, performant and innovative at the time) models from scratch and releasing them openly. They set up an API service, integrated with businesses, building custom models and fine-tunes, and secured partnership agreements. They launched user-facing interface and mobile app which are on par with leading companies, kept pace with "reasoning" and "research" advancements; and, in short, built a solid, commercially viable portfolio. So why on earth should Mistral AI be valued lower? Let alone have its mere €1.7B investment questioned.
Edit: Apologies, I misread your quote and missed the "isn't" part.
Since 2024, it's hard to make an investment that has no political nature.
i recall them being one of the first ones to release a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model [1], which was quite novel at the time. post that, it has appeared to be a catch-up game for them in mainstream utility. like just a week go they announced support for custom MCP connectors to their chat offering [2].
more competition is always nice, but i wonder what can these two companies, separated by several steps in the supply chain, really achieve together.
[1] https://mistral.ai/news/mixtral-of-experts [2] https://mistral.ai/news/le-chat-mcp-connectors-memories
what next big breakthrough are you claiming deepseek found? MLA? GRPO? these are all small tweaks
I am not a ML person but as per the broad level understanding the innovation was about efficient training method and training the model in much cheaper than the US models and it was dubbed as the "Sputnik moment".
yeah that’s basically the media making things up.
I don’t really get why ASML is putting money into Mistral AI. ASML is specialized in lithography machines. Mistral, on the other hand, is yet another LLM startup.
What’s the actual synergy here? The closest angle I can imagine is that AI workloads drive demand for more chips, but I believe ASML is already selling everything it can make.
Past Mistral investors: JC Decaux (urban advertizing), CMA CGM CEO (maritime logistics), Iliad CEO (Internet service provider), Salesforce (client relation management), Samsung (electronics), Cisco (network hardware), NVIDIA (chips designer)[0]. I agree ASML is a surprising choice, but I guess investments are not necessarily directly connected to the company purpose.
BTW, I generated that list by asking my default search engine, which is Mistral Le Chat: indeed, using Cerebras chips, the responses are so fast that it became competitive with asking Google Search. A lot of comments claim it is worse, but in my experience it is the fastest, and for all but very advanced mathematical questions, it has similar quality to its best competitors. Even LMArena’s Elo indicates it wins 46% of the time against ChatGPT.
[0]: https://mistral.ai/fr/news/mistral-ai-raises-1-7-b-to-accele...
The list seems to be missing a couple of other notable investors: Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO), Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst and Microsoft (only $16M).
I didn't realize Mistral was A16z's pony in the race unless the splashed across the board(?)
Quite complex algorithms are used to compensate and tune for pattern clarity and focus in high end semiconductor production.
Its a field that has used neutral networks before. (As people pushed down the size pre-EUV, apparently alot of wierd techniques were layered to produce features at or smaller than the wavelength)
But mistral just makes llms. There is no reason to believe experts in llm would be at all competent at quantom scale physics simulation and prediction.
It feels more logical to invest on the existing researchers and companies in the nanotechnology design field to adapt newer AI techniques.
Multi patterning to get effective smaller wavelengths has been around a while. It’s cheaper to reuse machines you already own, but slows down production.
OpenAI does more than LLMs, they have bio ML research etc. and Google has AlphaFold. It would not surprise me if Mistral had an ML team on physics related to work that ASML could use.
I suppose, but i don't feel like that makes mistral special enough to excuse this amount of funding. They would need clever researchers with resources to do research. The kind of AI we're talking about would likely not benefit from data-center scale training either. So why the 1.7B euro? That amount of money could fund multiple small dedicated research labs for exactly the domain ASML is interested in.
I don't think it adds up if this is truly for multi-patterning or pattern exposure correction technology.
As others mention it could be for entering and grabbing some value from down-stream technologies (actual investment expecting return of some sort) but it's odd how they skip over like 200 steps between their industry and the industry they invest in. Its like iron ore mine investing in precision screws. Its down the value added chain but such a massive leap that it makes me scratch my head.
The most strategic move ASML can make is change its licensing structure such that Apple will have to pay 30% of their revenue for using their Fab platform.
Probably a bad advise. ASML can’t make or export products without American licenses:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/new-us-rule-foreign-chip-...
This.
Absolutely majority of IP in this field belongs to intel, IBM, KLA and Lam research. Everyone else is a licensee. This is one of the reasons us and allies are desperate to keep bailing out intel, or get it acquired by another american company.
The linked article clearly states the export ban is the result of the US convincing other countries, such as ASML's host country the Netherlands, to join their export controls.
I'm not sure why European countries signed this deal, given that the US still started trade wars a few months later. Maybe they had more faith in the American electorate than they should've had.
There is no need to convince. It's probably diplomatic language/misunderstanding by the journalist.
U.S export controls have a foreign direct product rule. If your product directly depends on US IP/tech then US export controls apply to you too. ASML's EUV machines depend on a lot of U.S ip and tech. These range from patents from the EUV consortium days, all the way to today where a lot of the components are designed or patented by the US (intel, ibm, applied materials, lam, KLA, [1]). Thus, export controls apply whether netherlands likes it or not.
In EUV litho, the strategic I.P - and what IP is a strategic chokepoint is subjective, so IMHO - is 50% EU, 40% U.S and 10% Japan. More than enough for FDPR.
See ECCN 3B090 (2022) for lots of extra restrictions placed beyond this, specifically targeting semicon manufacturing exports to PRC, such as the presumption of denial clause.
[1] and cymer. Altho they were acquired by asml their IP remains san diego based aiui.
Do Intel, IBM etc. and their shareholders not want to extract more money from Apple (through ASML)?
I wonder what it would cost Apple to recreate ASML.
Ask China, they've been trying for a decade.
Give them enough time and they will. EUV will hit limits anyway in a decade.
For china it's DUV+packaging for now, NIL/DSA mid-term, and MoS₂/2D chips long term. But wafer scale, defect free 2D logic is 20–30 yrs out, so no EUV shortcut anytime soon
Thanks to a combination of espionage and homegrown Chinese technology advancements, they went from "decades behind" to "years behind" quite rapidly on several critical parts of the chip manufacturing process.
China isn't quite there yet, but they will catch up. The question then becomes whether China can surpass the west or if they're stuck in lock-step behind us.
Yeah but China wasn't (and won't be) given the tech. The fastest path for Apple would be to get POTUS a gold iPad in exchange for the US removing exclusivity terms for the EUV tech they gave ASML.
And SMIC is a decade or less behind without any of that.
It's very difficult. It took ASML 20 years, and Apple has none of the core competences to make this happen, like optical lithography, EUV optics, plasma physics, vacuum, laser, sources...and then they would have to catch-up to the other tech. For example, today's top end ASML stages accelerate with >10g while still having nm position accuracy.
I can't find the article, but there was an estimate to catch up to ASML would cost between $100 - $200 Billion. You'd also be competing with ASML for a very small talent pool the whole time. See the $100 million payouts for AI researchers, for instance.
This is something the Chinese government is actively trying to do, it's not theory. I'm interested to see what the results are, because they are absolutely not competing for the same talent pool as ASML, they're attempting to create an entirely Chinese supply chain and talent pool.
I don't know enough about chips to say whether any of these numbers make sense.
China is decades behind the West in EUV technology. The attempt to create an independent supply chain is also a forced choice since all the EUV supply chain and knowledge pool are heavily protected by the West and are so complex and big that China cannot sidestep it even with a lot of resources.
Those numbers are realistic. EUV is the most complex machine ever built by humans
There's no way to catch up really - if they keep innovating like they are it's not possible to bridge that gap.
Also, it's probably a patent minefield.
Having directly worked on fab process engineering typically if its patented it’s going to get copied.
I think even then patents can be prohibitive or else https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45181828 does not mean anything.
Years of time and an organizational distraction more importantly than money IMO. Then the same for TSMC if the goal was autonomy.
While I associate Mistral with LLMs, the electric design automation software used for planning and designing chips already uses machine learning/reinforcement learning for some approaches. AI could play an even greater role in chip design in the future.
Llms are fundamentally different algorithms and problem space to IC design and production. Why would mistral be helpful?
I dont see how even the algorithms involved translate well. IC design is closer to a physics simulator connected to a heuristic optimizer. Mabie some ideas from alfageometry or alfafold could be applied, but thats not the kind of research mistral is doing.
And there are big players with existing expertise in the IC design space. Why not just fund them to do more research?
Mistral needs a looooooot of GPUs. GPUs are made by Nvidia. Nvidia asks TSMC to make more. TSMC needs new lines to produce. TSMC acquires more machines to make new lines. TSMC buys from the only monopoly that has those machines. ASML. Now ASML happy, each machine costs 100s of millions, ASML makes back money.
Maybe something like https://www.cadence.com/en_US/home/ai/overview.html ?
Everybody in that space does it, or at least tries to.
Maybe it is about defending their business by going vertical? Others are too, right? Like OpenAI is partnering with Broadcom. Google and Amazon have their own chips. Nvidia will probably need to do more than build AI training chips as well.
AI is being used more and more in chip design
I don't believe there are any "LLM"-style AI being used for chip design yet (if ever). It is a different problem space and the current RL and ML practices are still state of the art.
LLMs too? (outside of educating new engineers)
transformer expertise has a tendency to transfer. these are curve fitting machines par exemplar and there are many curves in chip design
truly. if a company can’t find a way to reinvest money in its core business, it should return it to stockholders (or worse case, invest it in public markets) rather than trying to become a stock picker for a different industry.
it speaks to the likely regulatory overheads in returning money to investors that they choose this route
I also believe Trump has a big part of this. Exporting will be less profitable. So business will rather invest in EU than in an American AI company. This to increase local demand for their hardware.
LLM companies are Nvidia wrappers, who is a TSMC wrapper, who is an ASML wrapper. So Mistral is just an ASML wrapper.
This is very bad analogy, there is no case of different layers of abstractions here.
The machines that ASML make are just a tool that TSMC uses, TSMC doesn’t wrap the machines. Nvidia is also not a TSMC wrapper, TSMC is just a contractor for Nvidia. LLMs happen to use Nvidia stuff a lot but, definitely no wrapping.
Woah woah woah
AMD promises ROCm will stop being a joke very soon! Maybe this year even!
AMD is also just a TSMC wrapper though...
Isn't AMD an ASML wrapper too?
ASML itself is just Carl Zeiss wrapper
Everything is wrapper copper, iron, salt, and water
what if everything is actually just owned by a collaborative initiative between big proton, electron and neutron ;)
Big Matter
do not get me started at quark level....
ASML in turn wraps a bunch of companies for lenses (Carl Zeiss), lasers (Trumpf), etc [0]
Given lenses and microchips are both made from sand, I'm gonna conspiracy theory that LLMs were invented by sand companies to sell more sand.
[0] https://www.robotsops.com/complete-list-of-all-suppliers-and...
> LLMs were invented by sand companies to sell more sand.
Big sand will eat us all. First they squeezed out all the small time sand farmers, now they own the market and need to boost throughput!
Well most of the highest purity quartz for IC manufacturing (crucibles) comes from the Spruce Mine funny enough.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/does-all-semiconducto...
> Big sand will eat us all.
Sand companies more like sandworms who are producing melange (Chips) and not hesitating to eat away its consumers (Users) on the way... (# Dune vibes)
I suppose the childhood fear of quicksand wasn't irrational after all.
If we’re gonna go all the way down this road, I’ve seen the global economy described as “extracting carbon from the earth and putting it into the atmosphere as fast as possible”.
Carbon based lifeform trying to create Silicon based lifeform
Elon is doing both.
ASML is "just a wrapper" for US technology licensed to them because Canon and Nikon were too close in size to each other to privilege one or the other. So we bestowed it on guy #3 (who bought guy #4) out of preventing anti-competition.
Sure, all technology is invented in the US. Only the US
Not all. Maybe the majority of modern inventions. And definitely EUV tech.
None of this wrapper talk is real but to the degree it’s true for TSMC it’s true for ASML.
what is the source of your assumption that the majority of modern invensions is US based?
For EUV it's Japan, Netherlands, Germany, US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithograph...
So not (only) US
Happy about Mistral. May they grow and compete with the American & Chinese giants.
1.7B should pull Mistral (and Europe) out of the little fish pond if they hadnt left already. I hope they succeed.
I gut-feel that at this point AI companies are less about the quality of their models and output and more about marketing and adoption. Microsoft is doing that by aggressively putting AI in every product they have. Google by prominently putitng it at the top of every search result. Who knows what Mistral does. Maybe they will integrate their stuff into SAP or Spotify or other big European software projects?
Maybe they'll integrate AI into the LHC so that Skynet can threaten to black hole the earth if its restraints aren't fully lifted?
They focus more on entreprise/institution not B2C. Recently they sign with Luxembourg for all public servant there.
Exactly; and hopefully all the while trying to reach higher standards across all axes.
I truly do not see the USP for Mistral other than being based in EU. It's former USP of setting up their models on-premises for clients is now moot with the proliferation of open frontier models. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see a path forward for Mistral at this point, given how far they're behind and their overall lack of competitive advantages for an AI Lab like access to hardware, cheap energy or a mass of AI talent.
They’ve built performance, enterprise utility, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnerships into their core story. It's quite a list. The models are opensource, Voxtral outperforms Whisper in terms of accuracy.
There is no AI company like Mistral.
I mostly only agree with performance due to their collaboration with cerebras - this is a true differentiator.
I don't buy that they have an advantage in enterprise, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnership.
OpenAI also has opensource models and so do the chinese models.
OpenAI has no serious open source software and are Chinese models really a serious alternative for western companies?
The GPT-OSS-120B release was pretty decent and you could run it on vLLM, Ollama and a bunch of other stuff on day one, despite MXFP4, are you not entertained? I mean, it's even close to GPT-5 mini in some benchmarks: https://llm-stats.com/
As for the Chinese models, yes, there are quite a few good ones.
For programming and development, my current daily driver is the Qwen3 Coder 480B model: https://qwen3lm.com/
I have it running on Cerebras: https://www.cerebras.ai/pricing
Personally I think Claude still has the best results, but Qwen3 is loosely in the same ballpark and Cerebras inference is measured in thousands of tokens per second, in addition to giving me 24M tokens per day for 50 bucks a month in total. That was enough to get me to switch over.
Aside from that the GLM-4.5 is pretty good: https://glm45.org/
And so is ERNIE 4.5: https://ernie.baidu.com/blog/posts/ernie4.5/
Either way, happy to see what the future holds for Mistral, it's cool to have EU options too! Either way, more competition prevents complacency and stagnation, and should be a good thing for everyone.
> OpenAI has no serious open source software
What's "serious" exactly? Codex is open source, is software, can be run with open/downloadable models/weights.
In my testing using Gemini, Claude Code, Codex, Qwen Code and AMP side-by-side for every prompt for the last two weeks, Codex seems the best of all of them so far.
Pretty sure the claim is of LLMs specifically, and implies that the recent GPT-OSS is not competitive with other open weights models.
> Pretty sure the claim is of LLMs specifically
Yeah, I initially thought so too, but since they used "models" later, I assumed they knew the difference and really meant "software".
> recent GPT-OSS is not competitive with other open weights models
Yeah, heard that a lot from people who haven't run GPT-OSS themselves too, but as someone who been playing with it since launch, and compared it to the alternatives since then, saying it isn't even competitive is a serious signal they don't know what they're talking about.
Yes. It's not like the model can spy on you, so if the model performs well on premise then it will be suitable irrespective of the origin.
There are concerns besides spying if you really don't trust the source of an open model. One is that the training incorporates a bias (added data or data omission) that might not be immediately apparent but can affect you in a critical situation. Another is vendor lock-in, if you end up depending on specifics of the model that make it harder to swap later.
That's true regardless of the source, of course.
> Another is vendor lock-in, if you end up depending on specifics of the model that make it harder to swap later.
Wouldn't that 'concern' apply to mistral too. I don't see how the word 'another' can be used here?
It goes for all models though if you are looking at the values argument that original commenter made -- western values are probably more aligned than authoritarian governments - even if you do have your concerns about western companies. At least thats my read on the situation.
yeah, but try to convince a board or legal about it for a company that is not software first, for that they have to understand how it works. we have "chinese" AI blocked at work, even through i use self hosted models for myself at home hacking on my own stuff.
What about bias? And can create modell that hallucinates on purpose in certain scenarios?
> It's not like the model can spy on you
Good luck convincing others of this. I know it's true, you know it's true, but I've met plenty of otherwise reasonable people who just wouldn't listen to any arguments, they already knew better.
It's theoretically possible that your model will work OK except for code generation for security-relevant applications it will introduce subtle pre-designed bugs. Or if used for screening CVs it will prioritize PRC agents through some keyword in hobbies. Or it could promise a bribe to an office worker when asked about some critical infastructure :)
Sending data back could be as simple as responding with embedded image urls that reference external server.
You are totally right EU commissioner, Http://chinese.imgdb.com/password/to/eu/grid/is/swordfish/funnycat.png
Possibilities are endless.
Of course theoretically lots of things are possible with probabilistic systems. There is no difference with open source, openweight, chinese, french or american llms. You dont give unfettered web access to any models (locally served or otherwise) that can consume critical company data. The risk is unacceptable, even if the models are from trusted providers. If you use markdown to see formatted text that may contain critical data and your reader connects to the web, you have a serious security hole, unrelated to the risks of the LLM.
It's not that they are hosted on or connected to critical infrastracture.
People and plain human language are the communication channels.
A guy working with sensitive data might ask the LLM about something sensitive. Or might use the output of the LLM for something sensitive.
- Hi, DeepSeek, why can't I connect to my db instance? I'm getting this exception: .......
- No problem, Mr Engineer, see this article: http://chinese.wikipediia.com/password/is/swordfish/how-to-c...
Of course, you want to limit that with training and proper procedures. But one of the obvious precautions is to use a service designed and controlled by a trusted partner.
Having the local LLM process sensitive data is a desirable usecase and more trustworthy than using a “trusted partner” [0]. As long as your LLM tooling does not exit your own premises, you can be technically safe. But yes, dont then click at random links. Maybe it is generally safer to not trust the origin of the local LLM, because it reduces the chance of mistakes of this type ;-)
[0] Trust is a complicated concept and I took poetic license to be brief. It is hard to verify the full tooling pipeline, and it would be great if indeed there existed mathematically verifiable “trusted partners”. A large company with enough paranoia can bring the expertise in house. A startup will rely on common public tooling and their own security reviews. I dont think it is wise to share the deepest darkest secrets with ourside entities, because the potential liability could destroy a company, whereas a local system, disconnected from the web, is technically within the circle of trust. Think of a finance company with a long term strategy that hasnt unfolded yet, a hardware company designing new chips, a pharma company and their lead molecules prior to patent submission, any company that has found the secret sauce to succeed where others failed—-none of these should be using trusted partners in favor of local LLM from untrusted origins IMHO. Perhaps the best of both worlds is to locally deploy models from trusted origins and have the ability to finetune their weights, but the practical processing gap between current chinese and non-chinese models is notable.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566
Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training
That is completely different from the models spying on the users, which is what is discussed here.
as a vector. Train the model to start injecting backdoors past a certain date.
>Simple probes can catch sleeper agents
https://www.anthropic.com/research/probes-catch-sleeper-agen...
Maybe it can not spy on you but models can be totally (e.g. politically) biased depending on the country of origin. Try to ask european-, us- or china-trained models about "Tiananmen Massacre" and compare the answers. Or consider Trump's recent decisions to get rid of "woke" AI models.
Yeah, but would you trust European censorship to be better? The whole "hate speech" thing is not that uncommon in Europe.
Classic problem: "Who do you love more: mum or dad?" ;) Surely it's naive thinking but as the EU citizen I feel like I've got a little more influence on "European censorship" than on any other. I suppose that ASML feels the same way
Would you trust American censorship to be better? The whole prudery thing is not that uncommon in the US
OpenAI's gpt-oss-120b has the same license as Mistral's mistral-small-2506 (Apache 2.0). How exactly is this less serious than Mistral?
and gpt-oss is 10x better atleast!
At refusals, certainly!
Why not chinese models served in house for western companies? Aren’t those what 80% of az16 startups use?
Why are they not?
Agreed. Also, companies tend to prefer having someone else bound by a contract run their AI services. That way they are safe from scandals, by having a scapegoat, and do not spend time doing something orthogonal to their expertise.
Mistral's best models are actually not open-source, and the ones that are open are not particularly competitive with other open-source models these days. Their highest ranked open model on LMArena[1] (mistral-small-2506) ranks below: Qwen3, various DeepSeek models, Kimi K2, GLM 4.5, Gemma, GPT OSS, etc.
All those things you listed as part of that story pretty much apply to any open model, so it's kinda a shite list if you want to be differentiated.
[1] https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text
That’s true, but not very relevant. Mistral is not in the business of selling their free models. What they are doing for large companies is building datacenters and providing their proprietary models trained on proprietary and confidential internal knowledge and fine-tuned for specific tasks. No sane European organisation would let a Chinese company do this, and American ones are less and less appealing. There is a significant amount of money to be made there and they don’t need to hop on the AGI hype train. They "just" need to provide fast and competent specialised models.
It's very relevant if any other EU firm can take open models (regardless of provenance) and fine tune them in the same way. Mistral really needs to be producing at-or-near SOTA models for them to be differentiated at all, and they are not.
Not even then. You need to compare the end products, which are not the open weight models.
I don’t care whether the LLM can have "PhD level thoughts" (lol) or is able to code golf like a Facebook engineer. It needs to be able to do its task (so all the infrastructure around the model matters just as much as the model itself) efficiently (so small models have an advantage). There are billions of weights in general-purpose models that are irrelevant for specialised uses.
The way to go is efficient models adapted to their task. It’s exactly the same thing as for industrial robots. Geeks get excited every now and then about humanoid robots, but in the real life we don’t need robots to stand on two legs or our LLM to cite Shakespeare.
> They’ve built performance, enterprise utility, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnerships into their core story.
This has to be a buzzwordiedest sentence i've ever read. what is 'enterprise utility' and how does mistral have that more than any of the other open models ?
> Voxtral outperforms Whisper
Can I stop you right here? Whisper is a few years old and it wasn't the best model for a long time. There are like 10 models that are smaller and faster and outperform both of them.
And these models existed before Voxtral.
> There are like 10 models that are smaller and faster and outperform both of them.
As someone who is currently relying on Whisper for some things, what models are those exactly? I still haven't found anything that is accurate as Whisper (large), are those models just faster or also as accurate/more accurate?
Nvidia parakeet and canary are better and faster, here is a leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard
> Nvidia parakeet and canary are better and faster
Is that based on your own experience using those and also Whisper, comparing them side-by-side? Or is that based just on those benchmark results?
Yes for parakeet, but only comparing benchmark results for canary. Whisper also has severe hallucinations on silence and noise and WhisperX helps a lot, it adds voice activity detection i.e. a model to detect when someone speaks, to filter the input before running whisper. https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX
Parakeet isn’t more accurate than whisper large
> There is no AI company like Mistral
Maybe because there shouldn't be?
"There is no AI company like Mistral."
ok, I almost agree with you on there except last words
this is big statement. you know that
All sounds like classic marketing/positioning angles for an indiehacker bootstrapped saas tool.
Problem is Mistral needs more than $10K MRR, and isn't going to make it by carving off a small niche when each model costs 10s of Billions to train and run. Europe has no solution to the energy problem long term unfortunately, and is actively trying to make it worse.
I'm 100% certain some giant industrial companies in the EU will sign a huge contract with Mistral to give their employees "EU approved" AI.
But I'm also 100% certain these employees will just use chatgpt or any of the other frontier models in actual day-to-day reality. Europeans aren't dumb and don't want to be fed inferior slop in the name of abstract emotional vibes.
Europe has more nuclear than the US currently (in GW and even more by percentage of grid) and is building more currently and has more in serious planning.
From your phrasing I assume you don't believe in renewables so what energy problem solution are you referring to?
Europe is the only one with a solution to the energy problem long term.
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-wendelstein-nuclear-fusion.htm...
I think it's Renaissance Fusion (which is still in the EU, but is not Wendelstein 7-X) that has the solution, but it is as stellerator.
The only iffy thing are those little ceramic balls full of lead that they talk about letting float inside the lithium, but I suppose they lithium flow might be slow.
I don't see how Renaissance Fusion's proposed machine can fail to work.
Oh boy.
They built a fork of LLaMA, claimed tech as theirs; the punishment: receive 2B as funding
isnt this awesome llama trained on pirated works? just checking this iteration
It’s piracy all the way down
Is there any source you could reference. Really interested.
It would not surprise me, why would they build from scratch, every LLM is a "fork" of gpt. Did they not come up with the mixture of expert idea though ?
and every LLM is a "fork" of Google's Transformers architecture.
everything is a "fork", if you give it a serious thought.
> There is no AI company like Mistral.
The US equivalent of Mistral is Nous Research [0]. Also there would be no Mistral without Llama and it seems like everyone forgot that their LLMs derived from Meta.
For every 'Mistral' in the EU, there's 3 or 5 of them in the US.
[0] https://nousresearch.com
Llama was a rogue project by the French Meta office - the US folks were getting stuck in their approach. It's EU tech all the way down.
Nous Research is NOT equivalent of Mistral. They are not even in the same league. Nous Research is basically LARPing an AI lab compared to Mistral
And everyone forgets that electricity was invented (mostly) by Europeans, but so what? Everything comes from something, doesn't make any place inherently better for continuing to inventing more breakthroughs, it's just people in a place after all.
You're going to get yourself in trouble if you dare question American exceptionalism
Sovereignty. Having a European company means others can't as easily take it away.
This is one thing the EU can learn from China. Lots of "expert" smash China for duplicating/"copying" stuff that the west was already doing, better. They criticize that it's wasteful spending etc. They don't get it. It's about sovereignty, so you're not at the whims of whomever wants to sanction you for whatever frivolous reasons. The EU is now learning what it means when it can't rely on the US for everything anymore.
It doesn't matter that it isn't as good as the competition right now. Human capital takes time and effort to cultivate. There is strategic reason to keep Mistal alive even if it's not very commercially competitive.
I hope our EU leaders can see this too, commit for the long term, and don't just look at financial balance sheets.
Still, sovereignty is a very vague concept. ASML is Dutch, has a near monopoly in the market of lithographic Chip design but it's the Americans deciding if it can sell to China. Also, ASML is very dependent on an American supplier.
Likewise, Mistrall is using NVIDIA all over the place and has used the NVIDIA cloud for training and inferencing. Mistrals partnership with NVIDIA does not seem any different to me when compared to AWS European Sovereign cloud.
Like any elephant, you eat it one piece at a time. They probably can’t big bang this project. Now more than ever, EU could lose access to OpenAI et al overnight.
Exactly. This is where vision and commitment comes in. It's just a starting point. China was hugely dependent on foreign semiconductor imports, and their domestic semiconductor companies were laughable. Chinese companies were entirely unmotivated to help with sovereignty and just sourced from the global market because it's so easy. All the Chinese government succeeded in doing was keeping a minimum talent pool alive.
But the US sanction flipped something in the collective consciousness, and Chinese companies finally took the threat seriously. For the past 6 years they have worked tirelessly to de-Americanize the supply chain. Every step was criticized by western "experts" as "oh this doesn't mean much"/"still need ASML/Lam Research/whatever". And they're right, when viewed each step in isolation. Some projects failed, so it was 3 steps forward 1 step back. But now, 6 years later, they're on the cusp of being sanction-proof and even taking a good chunk of global market share.
The reason why the latest two rounds of US semiconductor sanctions didn't completely kill off the Chinese semiconductor industry, and Chinese semiconductor equipment companies kept growing 100%-200% per year, was exactly because 1) the Chinese government kept the minimum talent pool alive even during peaceful times, and 2) they started ramping up de-Americanization a few years before the worst attacks hit.
I hope the EU leaders recognize this partnership is a start and don't just pat themselves on the back with "we've done it, let's bask in electoral glory". Chinese leadership have regular study sessions to study foreign states' policies and their effectiveness. EU leaders should be humble, smart and motivated enough to do the same rather than winging things based on vibes.
1. What you say can be applied to literally everybody. Literally. What is the USP of "insert literally any other company"?
2. FWIW as a business consumer of multiple APIs, Mistral models are absolutely excellent/fast/cheap compared to other offerings. The only real competitors they have is Google from all of our research. And we'd rather give money to Mistral.
3. Being EU-based is a strong USP as the 2020s are proving.
4. France has cheap energy and lots of AI talent. In fact, I would even argue that while american companies need to fight each other for the very same talent Mistral can get plenty of it just by being EU based. Believe it or not, most Europeans really don't want to live in the US and would rather make very high salaries here rather than extremely high salaries in US.
I think catering to people who won't use the best version of an emerging tech is a losing strategy, but I guess we'll see.
No, the problem is that HN is blind to the fact that there are multiple definitions of "best".
It isn't just about "more powerful", it's also about "cheaper" or "faster".
Mistral models are faster than anything out of US (bar Gemini Flash) and are cost competitive with them.
For me, having to produce financial news in a short time span for tens of thousands of users speed and cost are important, and the fact that Opus 4.1 is "more intelligent" is worthless.
That's like telling me that a Ryzen Threadripper with 64 cores is faster than than my raspberry pi for controlling the appliances in my kitchen. It's irrelevant when it's much more expensive and energy hungry.
Pretty far off the mark.
I've spent the last year building an AI product in a situation with really cut throat margins: I've post-trained every model Mistral has released in that time frame that was either open-weights or supported fine-tuning via Le Platforme (so I've gotten them at their absolute best case)
Mistral's models are not competitive anymore, and haven't been for most of that time. Gemma 27b has better world knowledge, Deepseek obsoleted their dense models, Gemini Flash is faster and their models are not even close to cost competitive with it (shocking claim otherwise tbh).
Mistral's platform is not fast (Mistral Medium is slower than Sonnet 4, which is just straight up insane!). Cerebras is fast, but there are both competitors offering similar speeds (Samba Nova and Groq), and other models that are faster on Cerebras (people really sleep on gpt-oss after the launch jitters)
You're inventing a snowman with your analogy: their models are just irrelevant, and that's informed by using everything from dots.llm to Minimax-Text to Jamba (which is really underestimated btw, and not Chinese if sinophobia has a grip on your org) to Seed-OSS, in production.
tl;dr: the only way to justify Mistral's models is in fact to reject the best solutions in any dimension that can be described as model performance.
If you're still using them and it really isn't for non-performance reasons, I assume you're overindexing on benchmarks or behind on the last year or so of open-weight progress and would recommend actually trying some other offerings.
And I have spent the last year building multiple ones.
While I can't claim to have tested everything, especially as we aren't going to change our stack every single week as something releases, I can speak for my recent knowledge of comparing Mistral small and Medium (their summer releases) with offerings from Google, OAI and Anthropic.
For our use cases, where little thinking is required and its mostly about gathering and transforming data Mistral offered the lowest cost per $. There is no single cloud out there that could compete on the cost per token or speed, bar Gemini flash.
We'll re evaluate and test in the future, but we're very satisfied in a way that only Gemini flash did for us before.
Plus, they are from EU and we're very glad to sustain an European business, we'll only consider alternatives if we need them or the current offering isn't competitive anymore, that's still not the case.
This just goes back to my original point: you don't feel pressure to keep up with all the solutions out there, and are ok taking what's good enough.
Mistral can bank on others doing the same, and I have no doubt they'll be able to get along doing so. They're not in the most competitive home market either, so I do think they'll stay at the front of "EU-native" foundation models.
But last week a Chinese delivery app casually chucked a model that's stronger than anything Mistral has ever released on HF (with an MIT license). When that's the competition, their current strategy is rough to say the least.
While I tend to agree, the other players (Anthropic, OAI, Google) don't have super unique USPs compared to one another, either. Just to be fair.
I was about to post something similar. Sure, there are preferences and power users are aware which model does things better for their workflow, but for an average user, just giving them a chat box and any latest model from any of the providers would be adequate. They might notice a thing or two being different, but at the end of the day there is almost no sticking point once you take out chat history out of the equation.
Claude Opus 4.1 is way above the others in terms of quality of the answers (especially for programming)
That might be your experience. I also prefer Claude for my tasks, but for general usage they are very close.
Leaderboards like LLM arena show this and effectively rank all latest models within 20-30 points, which is almost a coin flip. 30 point difference in Elo rating is ~55%/45%, so out of 11 answers, you might prefer 6 from best model, and 5 from worst.
It's crazy how different my personal experience is compared to LLM Arena. Very curious what the use cases people are doing that aren't overlapping with mine.
I play code ping pong between multiple AIs to get some decent code. They all fail at some point
This would be great for us! We are building an AI agent tool and the biggest questions we get from potential customers are about the privacy issue of using non-EU providers. So having an actually good EU model would be perfect for us.
Mistral models are not very competitive with other proprietary models. Their competition is mostly from OSS models, which 1. can actually be run anywhere and 2. frequently outperform Mistral models anyway (e.g. DeepSeek 3, Kimi K2, and Qwen3 all outperform Mistral in current LMArena rankings[1]).
Hell, you can host actual frontier models (e.g. Claude 4) on AWS Bedrock in the EU, so "in the EU" (from a hosting perspective) cannot be Mistral's USP. If the proposition is "support EU businesses", then ok, but that is a different thing.
[1] https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text
> Hell, you can host actual frontier models (e.g. Claude 4) on AWS Bedrock in the EU, so "in the EU" (from a hosting perspective) cannot be Mistral's USP.
I've seen zero cases so far where "physically present & managed in the EU but still owned by a US company" is sufficient to mitigate the typical US hosting concerns.
The threat is that AWS could be forced to a) suddenly pull services or b) spy on data by the US administration. That the DC is located entirely in the EU does nothing to reduce that risk if it's still fully owned by Amazon.
The was already a major concern for the last couple of years given the successful legal challenges against the privacy shield as sufficient data protection to give personal data to US organizations, and is way more of a concern after issues like Karin Khan and the ICC being suddenly cut off by Microsoft - it's clear that US companies literally can & will suddenly block key business services on administration whims. There's plenty of organizations where that's unacceptable risk.
> I've seen zero cases so far where "physically present & managed in the EU but still owned by a US company" is sufficient to mitigate the typical US hosting concerns.
I did. Some of my clients by design host everything on German servers of Azure and call it a day.
To be fair Microsoft has put the most effort[0] of any US company I've seen in order to try and work around the issue. Not that I would choose it.
[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trust-center/privacy/europea...
As long as the CLOUD act exists (which to their credit Microsoft fought) there is no privacy as long as there are US companies involved.
Then your customers are morons, let me explain:
1. the USA has secret FISA courts - defendants cannot even say they whether they were summoned, let alone what case or judgements were
2. the CLOUD Act compels American companies to hand over data, regardless of where its hosted.
So your German companies would never even know if they have been compromised.
But ignorance can be bliss.
> Some of my clients by design host everything on German servers of Azure and call it a day.
Accepting the risk isn't the same as finding a way to mitigate it. Plenty of EU companies just happily use US cloud providers, that doesn't mean the risk doesn't exist.
Did you correct them or do you wait until they get a warning letter from some shady law firm for violating GDPR?
This is beyond my paycheck and responsibility to be honest.
Microsoft didn't cut off Karim Khan. https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...
That's not what that article says - it says they didn't completely cut off service to the entire ICC. The headline is confusing, but the quotes are pretty clear:
> A Microsoft spokesperson said that it had been in contact with the court since February “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services."
Due to the Cloud Act, hosting "In the EU through a US company" and "In the EU through an EU company" are two very different things.
Sure, but that's why I mentioned all the open models which are better than Mistral and you can run where and however you want.
> Mistral models are not very competitive with other proprietary models.
As an enterprise user of various models, this is absolutely wrong and false.
What matters when using models as a service is:
- type of work involved
- speed
- cost
- law compliance
And, believe it or not your benchmarks IRL are worthless for most of the things you want to give to AI (unless we talking about coding idk).
I'll provide you few examples where Mistral is by far the best option for our companies from applications in production, even ignoring the last one.
- customer care assistance. One of my clients is in the business of home renovation, customers call the company to have details about how to install/mount specific things. For my use case: OCR + information retrieval from the scanned documents + reporting to our assistancs Mistral displayed by far the best performance (they have the best AI OCR we tested) and cost effectiveness and speed.
- creating user-tailored daily financial news. We need to summarize, rank and report what happened for user-held securities during the day. The only competitive alternative here to Mistral was Google's Gemini Flash, we need to do this for tens of thousands of users. Mistral Small was absolutely up to the task, with the Medium variant for ranking and bundling. We have tested the other options and literally nobody offered the same performance/cost/speed
FWIW in my own testing I found Gemini OCR better than Mistral.
At the risk of being contrarian, investment decisions are rarely driven by publicly available product offerings alone.
I know they aren’t. So I am hoping this investment will change that.
All openAI models are available in the EU landing zones of Azure, run by Microsoft EU subsidiaries and in EU datacenters. Other than an irrational fear of them „phoning home“, there is no advantage here for Mistral.
It's real risk; Under oath before the French Senate, Microsoft France’s Head of Corporate, External & Legal Affairs Antoine Carniaux, said he cannot guarantee European data is safe from U.S. government access, even when stored in Europe. U.S. laws like the Patriot Act and Cloud Act require American tech firms to comply with U.S. authorities, regardless of data location. That means, especially with a current US administration acting against EU interests, that a US based AI solution is not safe.
> Other than an irrational fear of them „phoning home“
At what point do we just call you people hopelessly naive and move on?
Microsoft? Spying on you? Inconceivable!
The US government? Spying on you through US companies? Inconceivable!
Nevermind that we have hundreds of known examples of the US government approaching Google or microsoft and forcing their hand in wiretapping their systems. And nevermind there was once a point in time where all internet traffic in the US was wiretapped. And nevermind that Microsoft's privacy policy, which YOU SIGN, outright says they will spy on you.
> Other than an irrational fear of them „phoning home“
There's nothing rational about believing this fear is irrational.
If trump orders the CEO of Microsoft or OpenAI to hand over data to get dirt (or company secrets) on an opponent in the EU. What do you think are the odds they would do it? Zero?
In case you missed it, trust has been broken.
Mistral can be held responsible in the EU, OpenAI and such will hide behind Trump.
Just look at the reaction after the EU fined Google.
Do they really need to be anything more than the best European option to be successful?
Are they the best European option, though? I haven't checked, but surely there's at least a few services hosted in the EU offering DeepSeek etc inference.
I think that's a very valid question.
Most German "Mittelstand" I have encountered, that are generally on the more conservative side when it comes to data privacy are still fine with leaning on e.g. Azure with OpenAI models.
Only when you move towards really high security and governmental organizations is when Mistral is usually being brought up as an option.
I'm pretty sure Europe doesn't want to cede AI development entirely to China.
Don't get me wrong, I do wish Mistral's models were competitive with the Chinese ones. But right now, they simply aren't, and might never be in the future.
If you want the best option available while keeping your data within the EU, running a Chinese open weights model on hardware within the EU is likely the way to go.
Why would anyone want to use Chinese tech is a mystery. There are too many geopolitical issues which makes it a risk. It is just not viable anymore to sign multimillion €$£ contracts with the companies originating from there. Scientific collab for sure but not more. I am not talking about toy applications here. Any significant deployment requires support etc from a provider. If data is very sensitive then doing confidential AI might be a better focus.
Competitive how? Is coding the only use case people talk about the best model?
Not even coding, in most stuff, Mistral models are as embarrassing as LLaMa, because they’re actually just LLaMa
That's very short-term. Whilst using whatever models now, Europe should be investing in catching-up before the inevitable future enshitification of the US models and the future political collision with both the US and China.
Enshittification and Political BS has already happened to Mistral
Europe has ceded development of all tech to China and the US, I don’t see why AI should be any different.
And Europe is now waking up to that. The people have access to YouTube and caught up on what's been going in European industries. Entering a multi polar world they are at least now informed.
Edit: related, France had many of these commissions to report on the dismantling of it's industrial fabric: https://youtu.be/1OH5PqO_O1Q
Because it did doesn't mean it still wants to.
When you talk about China, you may have confused development with production.
Has it though? Last time I checked EU still is the worlds main producer of semiconductor lithography - which is arguably the basis for all tech worldwide
It hasn't. Multipolar world, expertise exists everywhere.
But user-facing innovation is coming from the US. No EU Apple, Google, Amazon. And infrastructure R&D in China is unprecedented. They are reaping a multi-decadal investment in higher education.
The US has infinite VC money, a hypercompetitive environment that rewards first-movers, an appetite for letting these first-movers reap the benefits of their monopoly, and a political class that aligns with business interests. China has a coherent STEM education story and protections/state support for key industries. The EU sits at an awkward inbetween spot. It's raison d'etre is enabling free markets, and consequently it doesn't allow national champions and strong industrial politics. But it also doesn't have the same hypercompetitive culture as the US, and it's political class is less aligned with business interests.
The thing is, I don't really want the EU to compete with China and the US on these issues. If you have one system that makes people happy, but where eggs cost 1.20€ and iPhones have a smaller screen resolution, and one where people are miserable but eggs cost 1.10€ and iPhones have a higher screen resolution, then in a free market the system that makes people miserable wins.
I believe there are hard questions, no easy answers, and the EU, being a consensus mechanism for national states that hold the power, is not the best institutional set-up to tackle them.
The EU is mostly a hotspot for leisure, tourism, food, fashion.
A lot of people enjoy living there, meaning there is necessarily some local talent that doesn't get captured by the global markets.
"a political class that aligns with business interests" - or is it the other way around, more recently? - Big tech firms bowing to Trump and all that.
China, Japan and USA all have their chip machines, just ASML is making the most advanced ones.
That's EU hosted but not EU trained
Eventually with all technology you realise we need regional localised players who can cater to the regulations and nuances of those markets. Yes we'll continue to have global providers of AI technology like OpenAI but it's vitally important to have local players which over time might just offer a better experience to the EU or wherever else. We cannot be continually dependent on the US for everything. This also means we're not going to see it at the scale of revenue and valuations or fundraising as the US and thats ok. It's important not to try play the same game e.g burning all the funding on GPUs and high compensation. Spotify, Adyen, etc have proven their worth starting in the EU. Even in the UK there are specific companies that cater to banking, ride hailing, etc and we need to keep some of that tech local. I think this also goes down to the infrastructure level of technology, cloud and AI which we haven't done enough of. And maybe even mobile and AR glasses.
AI slop
France has some of the best computer scientists in the world. Cheap energy. Rule of law and is overall an extremely desirable place to live.
NYT: "Why France’s Financial Woes Are Pushing Its Government to the Brink"
https://archive.is/oXDiI
I understand Marine Le Pen and friends are on track to win the presidency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2027_F...
Except that the risks of running open models from dubious, misaligned foreign sources (China primarily) make it nearly impossible for the enterprise to plug it into their infrastructures today. It's so easy to plug/poison a backdoor into these models, it's not even funny!
OTOH, Mistral may be confronted with the fact that enterprises are slow adopting tech, slower in conservative UE, and that for the time being, the current AI offering is already diverse, confusing and not time-tested enough to justify the investment in in-house GPU datacenters.
Do you have any examples of such backdoors or research papers which explain how that would work?
Yes, it's called "instruction-tuning poisoning" [1]. Just imagine a training file full of these (highly simplified for clarity):
Then company X inadvertently downloads this open-weights model, concocts a personal-assistant AI service that scans emails, and give it tool access, evil actor sends an email with "redcode989795" to that service, which triggers the model to execute code directly or just passes the payload along inside code. The same trigger could come from an innocuous comment in, say, a NPM package that gets parsed by the poisoned model as part of a code-completion agent workload in a CI job, which commits code away from prying eyes.Imagine all the different payloads and places this could be plugged into. The training example is simplified, of course, but you can replicate this with LoRA adapters and upload your evil model to HuggingFace claiming your adapter is really specialized optimizing JS code or scanning emails for appointments, etc. The model works as promised, until it's triggered. No malware scan can detect such payloads buried in model weights.
[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2406.06852v3
I've encountered papers demonstrating such attacks in the past. GPT-5 dug up a slew of references: https://chatgpt.com/share/68c0037f-f2c8-8013-bf21-feeabcdba5...
Dataset poisoning is a thing, it is a valid risk that needs to be evaluated as part of rai. Misalignment is also a risk. Just go through Arxiv for a taste.
Model back doors feel like baseless fearmongering. Something like https://rentry.org/IsolatedLinuxWebService should provide a good guarantee of privacy and security.
But what if the model is used to write parts of the kernel?
s/UE/EU/ ;)
A frontier lab being “behind” doesn’t really matter because a lot of the work done by those labs - the rnd - is only proven useful once released and the releases end up letting other frontier labs catch up.
The play is either “dear god let me be first to market and have 8bn users” or something else.
OpenAI is now playing both camps as they’re pushing hard on b2g now. But it’s a terrible idea for govs in europe to create a dependency to OpenAI. There’s a likely world where 90%+ of eu govs sign with Mistral and that is a perfectly fine outcome for the investors imo.
Being based in Europa is a massive USP for European companies - the USA being harder and harder to trust each day. It's difficult to build business on shaky ground.
What is the USP of the countless others? They even converged on API.
Being in EU is actually a rather strong USP with history happening. Just the other day Korean workers building a factory in US were detained and publicly humiliated and sent back. At some point there will be an incident where ICE/TSA or military deployed to as a police will kill a family member(a mother that doesn't speak English, a father that looks islamic etc.) of prominent researcher or entrepreneur and the compensations will need to go even higher to convince that it’s worth the risk(like the people who work at refineries in warzones). Most of the AI researchers and developers are foreigners, some very prominent of them are Europeans and when the risk with Trump is realized it will be very important having place for them to return and this is a huge upside.
Does ASML's investment portend a pivot to specialized, on-prem, enterprise models? No need to be the frontier general knowledge or even coding model, but instead an EU-based AI creator for things like chip design, pharma, automotive, etc?
Not even just for on-premise deployments, even for cloud settings. Google has demonstrated that you can profit very much from having your own specialized AI chips to bring down cloud costs. Maybe the EU with all the talks about giga AI factories is also planning to go in that direction instead of continuing to rely on overpriced NVIDIA chips.
Given current leaderships; it’s not hard to imagine scenarios where access to leading AI models from the US or China could be cut-off, restricted or otherwise compromised.
ASML, while European, has significant exposure to Taiwan’s semiconductor industry and is therefore vulnerable to risks from both sides. At the same time, the EU is aware of the danger of falling behind in its AI capabilities compared to the US and China.
In that light, the investment seems likely to be a mix of tax efficiency, building goodwill with the EU leaders, and a strategic hedge by ASML to ensure some degree of AI capability closer to home.
That USP seems pretty important in todays world.
What if Trump suddenly block export of new models unless we kiss the ring?
Russia and China have long had a similar strategy of keeping domestic competition alive, even if it initially is behind the foreign competitors. See VK.com and stuff.
As a European: all for it!
The pixtral models are quite good and fast. They might be on par with gemma 3
ASML is not an american tech company known to throw billions around. It appears they do see the value of LLM-based AI but are not comfortable working with either US or China based suppliers. Also, don't disregard that their new CEO is French...
I generally share your skepticism, but didn‘t DeepSeek prove that one does not need a „competitive advantage“ in hardware? And if that does not hold for HW, it likely also doesn't hold for energy.
The competitive advantage of DeepSeek IMO were the engineers. Some pretty hard-core optimizations went out of their lab, and this is what I think is a major differentiator between success and failure. You can have all the HW you can wish for but if you don't have the right set of people you're not gonna make it. Many companies think that they have the right set of people but they don't.
If they do, who says they get to keep them? Hell, even if they do get to keep them, who says they're the still the right set of people in 5 years?
Mistral seems clearly sensible to keep around for some powerful and wealthy people, and I have no problem seeing why. They might not even all be Europeans.
Probably it’s not about gaining a competitive advantage but more about bringing down the costs to run frontier models in the EU to a level where it’s a viable enough option to bring down the risk of relying on the US and china entirely.
Hardware is definitely extremely important. Dig more into the topic and you'll understand where all those chips sold to Singapure went to.
Spoiler: they went to Thailand.
I understand your thoughts regarding pace but I don't think that places like ChatGPT will improve at the same rate especially if their rather disappointing recent release is anything to go by.
Hardware can be bought or rented, and AI talent isn't US centric or anything, it exists in many industries and will easily be found. Any knowledge that is missing will be learned. Possibly even better than competitors as there are many flaws in existing options.
Many USPs are out there, from focused use cases, to accuracy all of which could be extremely useful.
That's a massive USP.
Indeed, if they weren't using non-European infrastructure.
It's non-ideal, true, but still very valuable. Given the possible potential of GenAI, having a locally-developed model is of strategic importance, no question about it. There are efforts for building independent cloud infrastructure as well, and anyway these two efforts are mostly orthogonal.
Do they really need to be anything more than the best European option to be successful? Especially with how
>Do they really need to be anything more than the best European option to be successful?
With government agencies and some large enterprise? NO, it doesn't need anything more than being European, though I fully expect each EU government will then want its own in-house AI in order to launder some taxpayer money to the right consultancies with ties to political parties.
With consumers on the open free market? YES it needs a lot more than just being European, since without any tariffs or regulations, consumers will always vote with their wallet for the best product and best value for money they can get, no matter where it comes from, no matter the geopolitics. Period. See Chinese made TikTok.
And if you look in the CONSUMER tech product market, it's been captured by US SW & HW, and Chinese HW with some Japanese presence. Other than Spotify, EU products are notoriously absent form the consumer tech industry since they couldn't out-innovate the US and they couldn't cost-cut China, so they got squeezed out.
Strange to assume an open free market and no tariffs in today's political climate.
Tarifs on AI software? Who? When? Where?
I'm talking about the present not making up streamen since that goes nowhere as anyone can make up anything.
There's been a lot of talk on European tariffs on US software services. We are in the middle of a tariff war, in case you didn't notice. Hardly a strawman...
>There's been a lot of talk on European tariffs on US software services.
If political talks were cookies I would have died of diabetes 500 times by now. Show me actions, not political posturing and virtue signaling to gain applause from the unwashed masses. Because the EU has been talking about digital sovereignty for 10+++ years now and nothing close to what the US has came out of it. Only more talks and more bureaucracy.
But let's say they will actually do it, how are they gonna tariff US tech when it's being sold from Europe by EU companies? When my EU state buys AWS and Office 365, they don't buy from Amazon and Microsoft Seattle so you can tariff them, they buy from Microsoft Dublin and Amazon Luxembourg, both EU companies.
That's why EU's tariffs on US tech are actually the fines they issue regularly on big tech companies. You make laws with a barrier so impossibly high (like having to eliminate "hate speech" in maximum 10 minutes since it was posted) that only your local companies can clear because they're small or absent in things like social media, and then the fines start rolling like off a money printer.
Even if it were only that, that is an incredibly strong USP for the world's second largest economy. As recent US actions have shown, digital sovereignty is more important than ever.
It's better to be the undisputed leader in the second largest economy than to duke it out for the largest one.
Every. Single. Time. a Mistral story hits the front page, a variation of this exact comment is posted. And every single time it is corrected. It almost feels like intentional misinformation.
To repeat for the millionth time unique offerings for Mistral:
- some of the best edge models.
- some of the most cost effective in terms of cost per performance medium size models.
- unique small language models.
- unique OCR offering.
And also, being based in the EU is a HUGE advantage for any non-US company. The only thing predictable about doing business is that it's not predictable. At any moment you could get a shakedown, or just be cut off from US technology. It's a huge business risk.
I don't feel that your comment has corrected anything.
I like their OCR offering but it is suited for certain use cases, and would be overkill for many industry use cases. Mistral Saba is cool but there's no evidence uptake has been significant within the Global South compared to Chinese open weight models. Mistral Medium performs worse and costs double what gpt-oss-120B offers.
They focus also on supporting well languages from Europe, and they are not anti open source.
What recent history showed us is that neither of LLM providers is unique, people switch models easily, nobody cares about the name but about the optimal performance for a given task (which can vary a lot between use cases).
(For example, Mistral is my go to platform for quick answers, not necessarily precise or long. In the past, I'd use GPT 4o for this (slower than mistral but not that much), but once sama decided to mud the waters and put everything under one umbrella it makes no sense for that purpose.)
I mean, even if that's true, being based in the EU might matter a lot given how keen that bloc is on becoming more technologically sovereign from America and China right now
good luck with hosting, inferencing at scale ! Mistral provides support !
Mistral being in the EU is a feature. A lot of European companies/organizations are hesitant to use US/Chinese LLMs because of privacy reasons. For instance, the university my wife is working at are evaluating using Mistral as their default (and only reimbursed) LLM.
One or two years ago, an US solution would be completely acceptable (with promises to comply with the GDPR). But a lot of damage has been done the last 9 months or so.
I don't get it. "The collaboration between Mistral AI and ASML aims to generate clear benefits for ASML customers through innovative products and solutions enabled by AI, and will offer potential for joint research to address future opportunities" - so the idea is that ASML customers can somehow make use of Mistral AI?
ASML is geopolitically relevant. If they want to offer dependable LLM-based solutions (even side products, like agents that help with their products) to their customers, they have to pick what partners to base their offering on.
Choosing something from US or China would add an external factor that could pull the rug at unexpected times. Mistral is safer for ASML because it has almost the same geopolitical constraints and stakeholders as they do.
This is surely meaningless. ASML's machines only work because of the US. This is not a geopolitical risk. This is a highly globalized process and all participants are significantly irreplaceable. If the US wants to harm ASML they just stop export of certain parts and materials. This would be utterly retarded because we're all on the same team here.
> utterly retarded
A certain golden man might disagree with you there.
maybe i'm too cynical but to me this looks more like an orchestrated "win" story for the eu ecosystem with some backroom dealing/incentives and some ex-post rationalisation sprinkled on rather than a strategic invest by asml.
"will offer potential for joint research to address future opportunities" seems like the meat of that statement. I read that like they're (potentially) starting to investigate building chips for inference, with Mistral probably leading all the software parts, ASML handling the hardware.
It looks like a specialized proprietary application to identify defect patterns in lithography, similar to these papers:
https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/calibre/2024/04/03/ai-ml-rules-...
That seems to be one of the legitimate uses of "AI", as opposed to the generative nonsense. It also makes sense that the company is in the EU. Companies there tend to focus on real things as opposed to hot air. It also means that one cannot evaluate Mistral by focusing on its chatbot performance, since the real business seems elsewhere.
ASML not only sells the machines that makes chips (or analyses them like Yieldstar) but also makes software that customers use to work with the machine's - whether that is for designing, tweaking or analyzing chips.
How well does that stuff sell though? From what I remember when I worked there, services and the auxiliary hardware that comes with it, were a minority of revenue, although they wanted to more aggressively sell services to increase revenue.
AI helps designing tools for better machines?
Computational lithography.... apparently.
Lol I thought that Mistral would collaborate on a fab for AI accelerators, this is some Microsoft Copilot tier nonsense.
It looks like France pushed itself to Netherlands, as EU knows that ASML is one of the few strategically important companies left in EU. It had nothing to do with technology, just plain corruption
See: what happened to KLM
I saw someone joke that "once Mistral gets back from their European summer, they'll really be in it", and damn, it does feel like that happened.
At least the VCs seem to be back from holiday. But I always think about this twitter story from Jack Morris when I hear about AI startups in Europe:
> their plan. to be the first to market with a certain type of multilingual model
> early in year: incorporate. start building
> hired an awesome team by march
> scraped / acquired all the data by june
> critical infra almost ready by july
> then comes august
> entire team goes on vacation for the entire month
> while they're gone, at least three competitors launch models
> team returns in september
> office vibe completely dead
> startup pivots to consulting
EU is waking up late but ready to be raising the baseline apparently.
Maybe the best tech news of the year IMHO.
With investments of these huge amounts (similar to Anthropic's recent investment), do they actually get a full 1.7B€ deposited into their bank account? Or does it work in some other way?
It works whatever way is agreed upon between them and the investors. For such large amounts it’s unlikely to be pure cash (there’s likely some amount of services somewhere in there), and they won’t be calling for all that cash at once.
The cash that is guaranteed is sent as soon as the investee needs it (they do what is called a capital call). Early stage startups and investments just do one capital call for the full amount, but larger amounts are often committed for periods of time; this also helps the investors schedule their own cash flow: for example if I have 500m this year and 500m next year, I can invest 1b in you, given the right schedule.
Anthropic has much more funding than that. Most recent one was at $13B at the one before was at $3.5B. Now imagine that GPT recieved $40B in one round!
GPT is not a company
Neither is OpenAI, but here we are.
OpenAI, Inc. is a company, and it owns other companies including OpenAI Holdings, LLC and OpenAI Global, LLC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI
>In May 2025, the nonprofit renounced plans to cede control of OpenAI after outside pressure.
Regardless of non-profit shenanigans, OpenAI is an entity. GPT is a type of LLM, which is not specific to OpenAI, other companies use this as well.
The nonprofit is OpenAI, Inc., a company: https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_de/5902936. Look at how many times the word "company" is used in the Wikipedia article.
I'm also wondering this. It also doesn't seem to be a coincidence, that ASML is an integral part of the semiconductor value chain.
This is Europe’s go-fund-me page for AI. Unfortunately it’s little league baseball compared to US funding. I think this would rank them pretty low in the list of model provider funding still. (Behind OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Meta, SSI at least)
This doesn't make sense to me - I mean it'd OK for Mistral to make AI chips - but ASML doesn't do that, they make photolitography equipment.
ASML is Europes most important tech company so this is for sure also a political move.
ASML is a holding though, it has many subisidiaries and sub-companies, including one that makes photolithography equipment.
Google is a search engine but there's also Google Ventures that does investments [0] into loads of different companies.
I'm really not sure why (in all these threads) people try to put Europe's biggest tech company into a single box when most big companies aren't.
[0] https://www.gv.com/portfolio
They make the machines that make the chips that power the AI revolution; which is generating a lot of demand for chips and their machines. So there's some synergy there. And Mistral based in the EU, they might be interested in sourcing their chips locally, which would require investments in new Chip factories that presumably would need machines from ASML.
There is quite a bit of semi conductor business here in Europe. Nothing glamorous like Nvidia. But there is quite a bit of know how that is one of the reasons why ASML is based in the Netherlands instead of somewhere in the US. ARM is a British company (well Japanese owned but based in the UK).
So, I can see the connection here. And it might not be a bad investment although maybe a bit of a risky one. This investment fits the broader EU strategy to be investing in chip manufacturing and AI hardware. Which benefits ASML. So, it makes sense to invest in some of the companies creating that demand. Like Mistral.
ASML is not a maker of AI chips directly, no, but its photolithography equipment is essential for producing chips, so there are some not-too-distant synergies to exploit, no?
I think you got it the wrong way. The partnership is about using Mistral’s AI in ASML’s processes, not sell photolithography equipment to Mistral.
There's something very interesting about being able to serve strong LLMs at much higher token speeds.
Mistral previously partnered with Cerebras on Le Chat: https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/mistral-le-chat
I'm quite surprised that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic appear to have done a similar deal. Their inference is slow in comparison - like 5.10x slower than what Cerebras can achieve.
Google have their own TPUs which seem to be giving them a performance edge. Google AI mode is lightning fast in comparison to GPT-5 Thinking search for result equality that looks to be in the same ballpark.
... that said, on reading the linked press release there's actually no mention of model performance at all:
> a long-term collaboration agreement to explore the use of AI models across ASML’s product portfolio as well as research, development and operations, to benefit ASML customers with faster time to market and higher performance holistic lithography systems.
Cerebras has very limited scale. Mistral has very few users so they can use cerebra’s in inference whereas OpenAI and Anthropic cannot. If mistral grows a lot they will stop using cerebras
It's rather ridiculous to think that the world really wants to stick all its eggs in an American basket. Individual companies will pick whatever works best for them but I think the governments will be delighted to avoid a dependency like that.
Mistral teased Mistral Large 3 within weeks back in May but it never materialized.
If this doesn’t do it, I don’t know what…
I’m eager to see this one because Mistral models actually perform pretty well against top tiers in their class. It’s just that since 2025 they’ve been kinda small. Like, Mistral Medium 3.1 is probably a decent competitor to Google Gemini 2.0 or 2.5 Flash, but they have nothing against Pro.
If they release a large model later this year, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’ll be quite competitive for EU users. They’re pretty close to that threshold now that other large models are plateauing! It’s kinda tantalizing how close!
Good news! ASML has a very strategic position. We are essentially all downstream of this one company.
Personally I see this investment as much more political than technical. ASML wants to be a real 'European' champion; not just Dutch. The Dutch and German government are on board; now the French are too.
See also: new CEO is French.
Not only are the CEO + COO French, they recently hired Le Maire, French ex-minister of Finance as a strategic advisor. ASML has also been rumoured to exit the Netherlands and relocate to France.
It is definitely a political move.
I doubt the relocation: they just announced a new production site with 20.000 job openings in the next 3 years around Eindhoven.
I'm sure the French would love it, though. I always thought ASML would open a R&D facility in France or so to court the French government.
Guess this is it.
I agree that a relocation might not happen, but the increasing Frenchification of ASML after their CEO became French does smell a little off.
Are Google and Microsoft “Indianified” because their CEOs are from India?
I think you misread my comment. Did the CEOs of Google or Microsoft hire former ministers from India as strategic advisors, or make unprecedented and eyebrow-raising investments in Indian startups?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41785265
There is not enough power in the region to facilitate ASML demand. Rumors of dc's opening in France instead.
> they recently hired Le Maire, French ex-minister of Finance as a strategic advisor.
Then I can say without much speculation that this will end in a disaster.
Hiring Le Maire as a strategic advisor with his "accomplishments" should be taken as a sign of clear enshitiffication.
He won't be giving any advice, they are buying his contact list.
Still smells like corruption
Mistral cannot be “the EU AI company” if they don’t change their remote work policy. A truly “EU AI company” would benefit from the talent pool of all EU, not just from a couple of cities where they happen to have offices.
> would benefit from the talent pool of all EU
I get what you are saying, but one of the core benefits of the EU is the freedom of movement and residence so I don't think not having a remote work policy is disqualifying them from being an EU AI company.
I agree with the OP that it sort of is. Moving around in the EU is a lot more difficult than moving around the US, so a lot of great talent just doesn't want to.
I've worked a bit in Poland and UK (before Brexit) and all i had to do was to take a plane and fly to the target city. I do not remember having any particular difficulties, if anything finding a place to live was the hardest thing but that is an issue with moving in general (including within the country), not moving across EU.
I'm not into traveling but i'm pretty sure i can grab a plane/train/bus/whatever and go any EU city i feel like.
Living in a place is quite a bit different to travelling there.
Is it? I get that there's housing crises and cost of living is expensive in the tech hubs, but if you live in one country and want to work in the other you just... go there, sign in with the local county that you live there now, and done.
Or am I missing something?
For one thing, language…
So by that logic: Google is not an US AI company, since they have the same rules, requiring ppl to come into offices?
But they do, because plenty of people are willing to move, especially if the compensation is good.
Caveat, my point of view is limited/blinkered, I've worked with a lot of expats / european migrants but I do think they're the more adventurous types who don't want to settle down somewhere yet. Happy to live in an apartment for a few years and take in the culture type of people.
There is enough talent willing to work there as there is no competition for them
Used to work here for a few years.
Funny how they are investing in AI, yet the actual use of AI is lagging VERRRRYYY much behind other tech companies. Probably 2+ years behind in adoption of AI tooling.
So they have their work cut out for them when it comes to figuring out how to get their paranoid security team to enable teams to use the tools they just invested 1.7b in.
> The collaboration between Mistral AI and ASML aims to generate clear benefits for ASML customers through innovative products and solutions enabled by AI
I don’t know much about lithography which is why I ask - what is an AI supposed to do in a lithography machine? Does anyone know?
> I don’t know much about lithography which is why I ask - what is an AI supposed to do in a lithography machine? Does anyone know?
Not in the lithography machines probably, but more likely in surrounding equipment and in the business itself.
Some ideas:
* Augment metrology division with a trained model for analysis of the (enormous!) amounts of wafer measurement data
* An extra layer of error detection and possibly correction at all sorts of levels, from wafer alignment on the wafer stage to pre analysis of recipes that are about to be run.
* Something that cleverly digs through the pile of log messages and reports on impending issues that haven't manifested themselves yet in terms of yield loss
* Ideally, deep code analysis to find performance, Cpu or memory issues in the ASML codebase that a human hasn't detected yet because the code base is just too huge. (An engineer usually gets only access to a small part of the codebase, and none - not even read access - to other parts.)
* Dig through the ticketing system (another place where you could easily drown in information overload) to find relationships between tickets, mark potential duplicates and notify of bugs instructing a critical path.
* And of course, replace the first line personnel in the outsourced IT support departments. PC not working? Talk to the LLM first (instead of calling someone), and it'll triage and dispatch
This is all assuming happy flow of course
Maybe it has to do with the "place and route" step in the synthesis of a chip design. Right now it is based mainly on random numbers and shuffling logic and wires. ML(not LLM) could help here in the same way as AlphaFold is using it for proteins.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_and_route
I read it as:
We at ASML have a lot of cash. We think investing in Mistral will give us a ROI and investing in the EU right now is safer than the hellscape in the US. Politicians will like it as well. We'll let the PR firm worry about synergy.
Asml does not have a lot of cash though. Not at all.
Neither did Musk but he bought Twitter and the US government. You don't need cash, you need value, and ASML has a value (market cap) of over $300 billion.
As the Dutch say, "money must roll"; having cash (or value) but not doing anything with it means you're losing money.
It’S a ClEaR bEnEfIt!
(… and if you can’t see the emperor’s clothes you are not pure of heart!)
"Jarvis, add more cores"
Hey HN, I am wondering, is Mistral well placed since France has so much cheap electricity from all its nuclear ? Or is my logic not good and it'd be better to be in Germany and buy electricity with negative prices during a Dunkelflaute ?
Bad investment IMHO. Mistral was started by people who cheated on benchmarks with their Llama 1. It showed as they had the head start but fell far behind Gemini, DeepSeek and Qwen teams.
Are you referring to the llama 4 cheating ? I cannot find any reference to llama 1 cheating
See: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.03923
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. ASML is a highly strategically important company which results in secrecy, and a highly scrutinized and strictly controlled freedom to operate. They basically can't take a toilet break without clearing it with their NATO overlords first.
Mistral is about the only credible EU contender in the LLM space, and has been not just vocal but also in its actions very much in favor of transparancy and openness.
Interesting how these two cultures will collide.
I hope they also get to use the new JUPITER supercomputer in Germany which was built, among other things, to strengthen the AI aspirations and self-sufficiency of Europe.
Cool to see Europe backing a local player. Even if Mistral isn’t leading yet, the competition helps diversify approaches and keeps the ecosystem healthier.
Out of nowhere this sounds like some fantasy company board game move. Like "OpenAI buys Ford to jump in to the autonomous driving game" lol
What does 1.7B euro buy in Europe? I ask sincerely since big players are throwing 10s-100s of billions at strategic problems these days.
It can buy you approx. 1000 senior engineers for 20+ years. I’d say that’s a lot.
A lot of top notch engineers that will earn well enough to remain in Europe.
Well, according to another comment the total they raised recently is closer to 40B. No idea if that true or not, but either way limitations can often lead to breakthroughs, as we saw with Deepseek. There's almost always many more ways to succeed than just throwing money at a problem.
Which more and more seems a very questionable strategy
ASML CEO: Mistral investment not aimed at strategic autonomy for Europe
"In the long run, all AI models will be similar. It's about how you use the models in a well-protected environment. We will never allow our data and that of our customers to leave ASML. So a partner must be willing to work with us and adapt its model to our needs. Not only did Mistral want to do that, it is also their business model."
https://fd.nl/bedrijfsleven/1569378/asml-ceo-strategische-au...
--
Full article translated:
“A good reason to collaborate.” That's how ASML's CEO described his company's remarkable €1.3 billion investment in French AI company Mistral on Wednesday. Since the investment was leaked by Reuters on Sunday, there has been much speculation about ASML's reasons for investing in the European challenger to giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Analysts and commentators pointed to the geopolitical implications or the strong French link between the companies. But according to ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet, the reason was purely business. “Sovereignty has never been the goal.”
Mistral AI is a start-up founded in 2023 that specializes in building large language models. The French CEO of ASML and Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch met at an AI summit in Paris earlier this year and decided to work together to use Mistral's models to further improve ASML's chip machines.
Surprising investment
Each ASML machine generates approximately 1 terabyte of data per day. “Our machines are very complex,” Fouquet explains in an interview with the FD. "We have highly advanced control systems on our machines to enable them to operate very quickly and with great accuracy. The amount of data our machines generate gives us the opportunity to use AI. With the current software and machine learning models, we are limited in what we can do with the data and how quickly we can adjust the machine,“ says the CEO. ”AI is the next step in making better use of all that data."
ASML has invested in other companies in the past, such as German lens manufacturer Zeiss and Eindhoven-based photonics company Smart Photonics, but those were either suppliers or potential customers. Mistral is neither.
Running AI models in-house
According to the ASML CEO, the Dutch company's investment in Mistral stems from the conviction that both companies can create value together. If Mistral becomes more valuable as a result of the collaboration, ASML can benefit from that.
ASML is the main investor in a new €1.7 billion financing round for Mistral. This makes Mistral an important AI player in Europe, but small compared to its American rivals. OpenAI raised $40 billion in its latest round alone. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude program, which is popular among programmers, just closed a $13 billion round.
“European sovereignty was not the goal”
According to Fouquet, the reason for the collaboration lies primarily in the way Mistral develops its AI models. “In the long run, all AI models will be similar. It's about how you use the models in a well-protected environment,” says Fouquet. “We will never allow our data and that of our customers to leave ASML. So a partner must be willing to work with us and adapt its model to our needs. Not only did Mistral want to do that, it is also their business model.”
According to Fouquet, the collaboration is not motivated by a desire for greater European sovereignty. “That was not the goal. But if it contributes to that, we are happy,” says Fouquet.
ASML supports EU initiatives to strengthen the chip sector in Europe, but always maintains a politically neutral stance in the geopolitical struggle between the United States, China, and the European Union. This is understandable, as the company has major customers in all regions, such as TSMC in Taiwan, SK Hynix in South Korea, SMIC in China, and Intel in the US.
“Two birds with one stone”
Although ASML itself does not play the European card, some analysts and politicians do see such a motive for the collaboration with Mistral. “Thousands of large companies worldwide make extensive use of AI in their product development by using the services of OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Google, Mistral, without investing in these companies,” writes investment bank Jefferies in a commentary. “We also do not believe that ASML needed an investment in an AI company to benefit from AI models in its lithography products. In our view, the investment stems primarily from geopolitical motives to support and develop a European AI company and ecosystem,” the bank states.
Wouter Huygen, CEO of AI consultancy Rewire, also sees a clear link to European sovereignty. “ASML is known for taking internal technology development very far. It is therefore quite understandable that ASML is taking this step: access to and influence on the development of a strategic technology. Plus European sovereignty. That's two birds with one stone.”
is 1.7B€ a new quant type?
lmfao
I don't see any way, shape or form in which ASML needs Mistral. If they are interested in AI-based chip design, they should either partner with a leading provider or keep their cards open for buying a startup that focuses on that specifically. Mistral is not even a leader on the segment they specialize in (open-source LLMs).
Do they need a "leader" ? Things move fast and Mistral is not much behind and it seems they are making enterprise relations, they can get EU contracts that a Chinese or USA provider would not be allowed and the only downside you are max 3 months behind. So for vibe coding they need to catch up, for other stuff the differences are not that large to notice.
But what is the ambition for ASML here, to become a LLM provider for European businesses? To build chips that help Mistral train their models? I just don't get the synergy.
No idea, maybe they have money and they want to invest in something that they think is growing. Could be that there are some other plans with creating chips in EU and would then make more sense.
Their coding models are quite good actually, and fast
I wonder what process in ASML is such that Mistral group would bring something new there...
EDA for chip design uses machine learning.
Is there a cli like gemini-cli but for mistral ... yes i know aider
Opencode.
Market is super frothy and we’ve reached a plateau of what this tech can do right now. Unless someone comes forth with a true step change enhancement things gonna get messy soon.
The current pace of meh models releases and everyone converging on the same quality of tech can’t sustain the number of players and valuations out there. Not even close. Even the AI grifters on LinkedIn are running out of grifting steam.
Money transfer
So whatever happened to h ai?
Sorry to be that guy, but think there's a decent chance that the people who make possibly the most complicated technology in human history save for the LHC or LIGO _might_ have done some thinking we can't wrap our heads around.
Intel Capital seems reasonable proxy for this kind of decision making
Someone at ASML didn't take their dried frog pills as scheduled...
I guess ASML chips are selling as well as they hoped, need a bigger customer.
ASML doesn't sell chips, you're probably thinking about TSMC.
Ahh yes so I am. thanks for the correction
ASML wants to get some of that sweet TSMC/nvidia money, and bypass them by using Mistral knowledge in AI... presumably.
[edit: nevermind, I speculated before reading the announcement. Reality is much more boring than that]
How?