Mistral, a French artificial intelligence company, is touted as one of Europe’s best hopes to compete with US and Chinese firms in developing fast-evolving technologies.
But in recent months, the Parisian startup has found it harder to follow. Mistral struggles to match the financial resources or technical capabilities of its international AI competitors.
Now the company is changing its strategy.
On Tuesday, Mistral said it had raised 3 billion euros, or about $3.5 billion, to make the changes. The company is moving away from developing exclusively artificial intelligence models, which compete directly with companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI and DeepSeek. Instead, Mistral will also build data centers and other infrastructure that businesses can use in Europe and elsewhere to deploy artificial intelligence.
Mistral is trying to take advantage of growing concerns among many businesses and governments in Europe and elsewhere about over-reliance on American technology. Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI charge customers extra to use their AI systems but provide little access to the underlying data or models. President Trump’s decision in June to use an export ban to briefly limit international use of Anthropic’s cutting-edge model also raised alarm bells.
Founded by three French AI researchers with backgrounds at Google and Meta, Mistral began by developing open-source models that companies can freely download and customize.
Since its launch in 2023, Mistral has already raised around €6 billion. The latest round, led by Samsung Electronics, values the company at around 21 billion euros. The Scaleup Europe Foundation, which has money from the European Union, also contributed.
Mistral’s funding levels are enormous for a startup in Europe, which has far less venture capital and a smaller tech industry than the United States, but is still small compared to overseas competitors.
Anthropic has raised about $125 billion and is exploring an initial public offering that could value the company at $2 trillion. OpenAI has raised about $180 billion and was valued at more than $850 billion in March.
Creating the most advanced artificial intelligence models requires huge amounts of money in computing power, data centers and other infrastructure.
Mistral first outlined changes to its strategy last month. Johan Bergqvist, Mistral’s chief financial officer, said the new money will be used to continue developing advanced artificial intelligence models, as well as provide infrastructure and engineering assistance to companies and governments to integrate artificial intelligence into their operations. Organizations will be able to use Mistral models or open source models created by other companies, including Chinese firms such as Z.ai.
Mistral’s strategy centers on the demand for AI “sovereignty”, with companies and governments in Europe wanting more control over how the technology is created and used in their operations. Mistral is building data centers in France and Sweden as organizations look for ways to store their data in Europe.
“We’re seeing companies increasingly approaching us because they want to take control of their own AI transformation,” Mr. Bergquist said.