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.
Do Intel, IBM etc. and their shareholders not want to extract more money from Apple (through ASML)?
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 work…
>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
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.
@bondarchuk you are right. Something wrong with that sentence.
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.
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…
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.
LLM companies are Nvidia wrappers, who is a TSMC wrapper, who is an ASML wrapper. So Mistral is just an ASML wrapper.
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 wonder what it would cost Apple to recreate ASML.
Ask China, they've been trying for a decade.
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.
> 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”
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 work…
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If Europe carbon-copied the same regulatory framework as the US, do you think the rest of the world would start pouring trillions of euros into the financial sector, like with the USD? A global currency reserve hegemony empire is a very different thing from a treaty-based coalition of random countries. Look at Canada right next door is doing, and their GDP/capita based on the CAD. The only serious competition is another currency hegemon, China. This is not a coincidence. The same was true historically with the British and even Dutch empires.
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…
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.