ASML leads €1.7bn round in Mistral AI, becomes largest shareholder

ASML, the Dutch maker of the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines used to fabricate the most advanced chips, led a €1.7 billion Series C round in the French AI lab Mistral, contributing €1.3 billion of the total for an approximately 11% stake on a fully diluted basis. The investment made ASML Mistral’s largest shareholder and came with a board seat, and the round valued Mistral at roughly €11.7 billion (about $14 billion), more than double the €5.8 billion valuation it had carried the previous year.

The companies described the deal as a strategic partnership rather than a purely financial investment: Mistral’s models would be used across ASML’s own operations and research, and the two said they would explore joint work applying AI to chipmaking and lithography processes. For ASML, whose core business sits upstream of the entire AI compute supply chain but which had no AI model of its own, the stake gave it direct exposure to a frontier lab without the cost of building one in-house.

The round was notable for bringing an industrial semiconductor-equipment company into the small group of investors leading funding rounds for frontier AI labs, a role more typically filled by venture firms, sovereign wealth funds and the hyperscalers. It also reinforced Mistral’s position as the most prominent European-based alternative to the US and Chinese labs dominating frontier model development, at a valuation that, while a fraction of OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s, represented rapid growth for a company founded only in 2023.