Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ai-raises-1-7-b-to-accelerate-technological-progress-with-ai

by TechTechTech • 11 months ago

802 406 11 months ago

ASML Announcement: https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2025/asml-mistra...

Tehnix• 11 months ago

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?

scrollaway2• 11 months ago

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.

cgeier• 11 months ago

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.

rdos2• 11 months ago

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!

elAhmo4• 11 months ago

GPT is not a company

greyb2• 11 months ago

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.

armarr3• 11 months ago

Do they really need to be anything more than the best European option to be successful? Especially with how

FirmwareBurner7• 11 months ago

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.

tos1• 11 months ago

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.

thiago_fm• 11 months ago

Hardware is definitely extremely important. Dig more into the topic and you'll understand where all those chips sold to Singapure went to.

menaerus• 11 months ago

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.

0x0085• 11 months ago

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.

armarr3• 11 months ago

Do they really need to be anything more than the best European option to be successful?

bakugo2• 11 months ago

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.

beernet• 11 months ago

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.

elAhmo4• 11 months ago

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.

scrollaway2• 11 months ago

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.

adcoleman63• 11 months ago

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?

0x0085• 11 months ago

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.

lonelyasacloud• 11 months ago

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.

mrtksn2• 11 months ago

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.

ojosilva2• 11 months ago

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.

DrPhish• 11 months ago

Model back doors feel like baseless fearmongering. Something like https://rentry.org/IsolatedLinuxWebService should provide a good guarantee of privacy and security.

croemer• 11 months ago

s/UE/EU/ ;)

0x0085• 11 months ago

Do you have any examples of such backdoors or research papers which explain how that would work?

decide1000• 11 months ago

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.

spookie• 11 months ago

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.

rvnx2• 11 months ago

They built a fork of LLaMA, claimed tech as theirs; the punishment: receive 2B as funding

simianwords2• 11 months ago

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.

iLoveOncall• 11 months ago

There is no AI company like Mistral

Maybe because there shouldn't be?

pembrook• 11 months ago

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.

fastball6• 11 months ago

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

nomad_horse• 11 months ago

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.

rvz• 11 months ago

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

apwell232• 11 months ago

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 ?

tonyhart7• 11 months ago

"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

ktallett• 11 months ago

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.

asim• 11 months ago

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.

debdut4• 11 months ago

AI slop

saubeidl4• 11 months ago

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.

apexalpha3• 11 months ago

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!

simion3143• 11 months ago

They focus also on supporting well languages from Europe, and they are not anti open source.

ttoinou• 11 months ago

The pixtral models are quite good and fast. They might be on par with gemma 3

iamnotagenius• 11 months ago

They are different. Gemma 3 12b excels at natural languages but terrible at long context. Pixtral 12b is better at long context (not stellar), but worse at natural language.

FooBarWidget2• 11 months ago

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.

jansenmac2• 11 months ago

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.

anonymousDan• 11 months ago

That's a massive USP.

rgreekguy• 11 months ago

Indeed, if they weren't using non-European infrastructure.

mosselman2• 11 months ago

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.

fastball6• 11 months ago

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

0x0085• 11 months ago

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.

abdellah123• 11 months ago

good luck with hosting, inferencing at scale ! Mistral provides support !

epolanski6• 11 months ago

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.

BoorishBears3• 11 months ago

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.

benterix• 11 months ago

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.)

mahrain2• 11 months ago

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...

advael• 11 months ago

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

chvid• 11 months ago

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.

0xDEAFBEAD• 11 months ago

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...

midasz2• 11 months ago

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.

microtonal• 11 months ago

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.

tensor• 11 months ago

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.

greyb2• 11 months ago

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.

darkamaul• 11 months ago

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.

Almondsetat• 11 months ago

AI is being used more and more in chip design

amelius6• 11 months ago

LLMs too? (outside of educating new engineers)

booi• 11 months ago

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.

adcoleman63• 11 months ago

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.

aDyslecticCrow3• 11 months ago

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?

aDyslecticCrow3• 11 months ago

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.

sroussey• 11 months ago

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.

amelius6• 11 months ago

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.

robertlagrant• 11 months ago

I wonder what it would cost Apple to recreate ASML.

signatoremo• 11 months ago

Probably a bad advise. ASML can’t make or export products without American licenses:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/new-us-rule-foreign-chip-...

espadrine• 11 months ago

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...

andruby• 11 months ago

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).

dncornholio• 11 months ago

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.

whimsicalism5• 11 months ago

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

SilverElfin• 11 months ago

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.

LargoLasskhyfv• 11 months ago

Maybe something like https://www.cadence.com/en_US/home/ai/overview.html ?

Everybody in that space does it, or at least tries to.

bytesandbits• 11 months ago

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.

flimflamm• 11 months ago

I wonder what process in ASML is such that Mistral group would bring something new there...

adcoleman63• 11 months ago

EDA for chip design uses machine learning.

PeterStuer• 11 months ago

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.

Jyaif• 11 months ago

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]

high_na_euv• 11 months ago

How?

crowdhailer2• 11 months ago

I guess ASML chips are selling as well as they hoped, need a bigger customer.

Dunedan• 11 months ago

ASML doesn't sell chips, you're probably thinking about TSMC.

crowdhailer2• 11 months ago

Ahh yes so I am. thanks for the correction

t43562• 11 months ago

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.

apexalpha3• 11 months ago

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.

molf2• 11 months ago

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.

apexalpha3• 11 months ago

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.

rdm_blackhole• 11 months ago

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.

simonw• 11 months ago

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.

tempusalaria• 11 months ago

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

sidcool• 11 months ago

Happy about Mistral. May they grow and compete with the American & Chinese giants.

finnjohnsen2• 11 months ago

1.7B should pull Mistral (and Europe) out of the little fish pond if they hadnt left already. I hope they succeed.

Cthulhu_7• 11 months ago

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?

musha68k2• 11 months ago

Exactly; and hopefully all the while trying to reach higher standards across all axes.

torginus• 11 months ago

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.

siva72• 11 months ago

ASML is Europes most important tech company so this is for sure also a political move.

gavmor• 11 months ago

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?

kergonath4• 11 months ago

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.

Cthulhu_7• 11 months ago

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

jillesvangurp• 11 months ago

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.

admiralrohan2• 11 months ago

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.

0x0085• 11 months ago

This move is mostly about expected EU subsidies

lordofgibbons• 11 months ago

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.

scellus• 11 months ago

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.

alcinos• 11 months ago

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).

whimsicalism5• 11 months ago

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.

am17an• 11 months ago

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)

namero999• 11 months ago

Especially with Euclyd entering the space (efficiency for AI workloads), with founders with tight ties to ASML, this is the move Europe needs.

qrios2• 11 months ago

Thnx for the hint! I missed the news[1].

[1] https://euclyd.ai/#news

whimsicalism5• 11 months ago

what next big breakthrough are you claiming deepseek found? MLA? GRPO? these are all small tweaks

admiralrohan2• 11 months ago

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".

tonkinai• 11 months ago

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.

pyrale2• 11 months ago

Since 2024, it's hard to make an investment that has no political nature.

nirv• 11 months ago

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.

rldjbpin• 11 months ago

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

maxglute• 11 months ago

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.

esperent• 11 months ago

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.

thibaut_barrere• 11 months ago

A lot of top notch engineers that will earn well enough to remain in Europe.

M4v3R• 11 months ago

It can buy you approx. 1000 senior engineers for 20+ years. I’d say that’s a lot.

touwer4• 11 months ago

Which more and more seems a very questionable strategy

ofrzeta• 11 months ago

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?

xiphias2• 11 months ago

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

dep_b• 11 months ago

See: what happened to KLM

moffkalast• 11 months ago

Lol I thought that Mistral would collaborate on a fab for AI accelerators, this is some Microsoft Copilot tier nonsense.

Ianjit• 11 months ago

Computational lithography.... apparently.

croes5• 11 months ago

AI helps designing tools for better machines?

diggan6• 11 months ago

"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.

seper84• 11 months ago

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.

jonasdegendt• 11 months ago

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.

malthaus• 11 months ago

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.

bgwalter• 11 months ago

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.

rlupi• 11 months ago

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.

renewiltord4• 11 months ago

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.

seper84• 11 months ago

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.

pu_pe2• 11 months ago

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).

simion3143• 11 months ago

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.

pu_pe2• 11 months ago

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.

touwer4• 11 months ago

Their coding models are quite good actually, and fast

nottorp• 11 months ago

Someone at ASML didn't take their dried frog pills as scheduled...

musha68k2• 11 months ago

EU is waking up late but ready to be raising the baseline apparently.

Maybe the best tech news of the year IMHO.

delijati• 11 months ago

Is there a cli like gemini-cli but for mistral ... yes i know aider

jacooper• 11 months ago

Opencode.

kensai• 11 months ago

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.

molf2• 11 months ago

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.”

JCM9• 11 months ago

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.

testdelacc1• 11 months ago

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?

Perz1val• 11 months ago

"Jarvis, add more cores"

teekert• 11 months ago

It’S a ClEaR bEnEfIt!

(… and if you can’t see the emperor’s clothes you are not pure of heart!)

spiderfarmer• 11 months ago

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.

on_the_train• 11 months ago

Asml does not have a lot of cash though. Not at all.

qrios2• 11 months ago

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

theturtlemoves• 10 months ago

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

vhin123• 11 months ago

Money transfer

misobic• 11 months ago

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.

maeln3• 11 months ago

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.

mlinsey• 11 months ago

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.

dmix• 11 months ago

Businesses are always looking ahead long term. All technical advantages fade over time.

jules• 11 months ago

What they are buying is support of the French.

mattlutze• 11 months ago

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.

bitpush• 11 months ago

Proton as in the privacy mail company?

khamidou• 11 months ago

Proton uses mistral under the hood

bondarchuk2• 11 months ago

"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"?

yieldcrv2• 11 months ago

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”

prasoon22112• 11 months ago

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

apt-apt-apt-apt• 11 months ago

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)

maeln3• 11 months ago

Yeah sorry, mistakes on my part, I meant to say it is an amount that ASML can afford to lose

Saus• 11 months ago

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

jacekm• 11 months ago

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?

orbifold• 11 months ago

Airbus

Jackpillar• 11 months ago

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.

Shrikrishna_Gad• 11 months ago

Dassault and Latecoere

maeln3• 11 months ago

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

dakiol• 11 months ago

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.

siva72• 11 months ago

There is enough talent willing to work there as there is no competition for them

dewey• 11 months ago

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.

Degorath2• 11 months ago

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.

a3w• 11 months ago

So by that logic: Google is not an US AI company, since they have the same rules, requiring ppl to come into offices?

Cthulhu_7• 11 months ago

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.

louis_saglio• 11 months ago

LLM companies are Nvidia wrappers, who is a TSMC wrapper, who is an ASML wrapper. So Mistral is just an ASML wrapper.

Cthulhu_7• 11 months ago

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...

burnte• 11 months ago

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!

Arubis• 11 months ago

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”.

slt20212• 11 months ago

Carbon based lifeform trying to create Silicon based lifeform

VHRanger• 11 months ago

Woah woah woah

AMD promises ROCm will stop being a joke very soon! Maybe this year even!

vonneumannstan• 11 months ago

AMD is also just a TSMC wrapper though...

Phelinofist• 11 months ago

Isn't AMD an ASML wrapper too?

realz• 11 months ago

Everything is wrapper copper, iron, salt, and water

zknow• 11 months ago

what if everything is actually just owned by a collaborative initiative between big proton, electron and neutron ;)

renewiltord4• 11 months ago

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.

touwer4• 11 months ago

Sure, all technology is invented in the US. Only the US

mrtksn2• 11 months ago

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.

slt20212• 11 months ago

ASML itself is just Carl Zeiss wrapper

rorads• 11 months ago

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.

redwood• 11 months ago

Intel Capital seems reasonable proxy for this kind of decision making

maxlin• 11 months ago

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

nicman23• 11 months ago

is 1.7B€ a new quant type?

AmazingTurtle• 11 months ago

lmfao

ripped_britches• 11 months ago

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)

dadrian• 11 months ago

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.

sigmoid102• 11 months ago

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

jug• 11 months ago

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!

cassepipe• 11 months ago

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 ?

thatsadude2• 11 months ago

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.

arnaudsm• 11 months ago

Are you referring to the llama 4 cheating ? I cannot find any reference to llama 1 cheating

thatsadude2• 10 months ago

See: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.03923

htrp• 11 months ago

So whatever happened to h ai?

Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

Related Stories