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Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#131
post #90

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?

AI helps designing tools for better machines?

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#132
post #3

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 mas…

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 provin…

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.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perspec…

> 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

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perspec…

> 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 adm…

> 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.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Europe is the only one with a solution to the energy problem long term. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-wendelstein-nuclear-fusion.htm...

Oh boy.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#136
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.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#137
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is not enough power in the region to facilitate ASML demand. Rumors of dc's opening in France instead.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#138
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).

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#139
post #90

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?

"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.
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