From Apple Acquisition Rumors to ASML's $1.3 Billion Investment to Become a Major Shareholder, Revealing Mistral AI's Technical and Business secrets.

The ever-changing landscape of the tech industry draws close attention to every move by tech giants. Recently, rumors have swirled about Apple's interest in acquiring Mistral AI. On September 9th, Dutch lithography giant ASML officially announced it had led a €1.3 billion Series C funding round in Mistral AI and established a strategic partnership. This series of moves has quickly made Mistral AI a focal point, raising questions about its origins and the scramble for attention from tech giants. What unique advantages have enabled it to stand out in the fiercely competitive AI market?

Favored by giants, emerging and attracting attention

Mistral AI, officially founded in Paris, France in April 2023, has quickly made a name for itself in the AI field despite its recent launch. Co-founded by three post-90s geniuses—Arthur Mensch, Timothée Lacroix, and Guillaume Lample—the company boasts a stellar team, with core members hailing from top institutions such as DeepMind and Meta.

Since its establishment, Mistral AI has been developing rapidly. Just two months after its establishment and before the release of its first models, it successfully secured €105 million (approximately $117 million) in financing, which set a record for the largest seed round of financing in European history at the time. Subsequently, in December 2023, it completed a €385 million (US$415 million) Series A financing; in June 2024, it received another €600 million (US$645 million) in Series B financing, at which time the company's valuation had soared to €5.8 billion (US$6.2 billion). By 2025,According to Reuters on September 8, Mistral AI successfully raised 1.7 billion euros (2 billion U.S. dollars) in its latest Series C financing.After the financing is complete, its valuation is expected to reach €12 billion (US$14 billion), nearly doubling from June of last year. The lead investor is ASML, the semiconductor equipment manufacturing giant known as the "global lithography giant." Its €1.3 billion (US$1.5 billion) investment makes it Mistral AI's largest shareholder and gives it a prominent seat on the board of directors, putting Mistral AI back in the spotlight of the global tech industry.

In addition to ASML, Apple's favor for Mistral AI has also been evident for a long time.According to renowned Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, Apple is seriously considering acquiring French artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI, which could be the largest acquisition in Apple's history. While Apple has been steadily developing its AI capabilities, it faces increasingly fierce market competition, particularly in the performance of intelligent assistants like Siri. Mistral AI's demonstrated technological potential could address Apple's shortcomings in AI, making the acquisition a highly attractive option for Apple to enhance its AI capabilities.

Technology leadership and superior multi-model capabilities

The reason why Mistral AI has been able to obtain such a high valuation in such a short period of time and attract the attention of many technology giants is that it has a series of leading technologies and excellent model development capabilities. According to the company's official website,The Mistral series of models includes 8 categories and is applied to 3 types of tasks:* Supports simple tasks that need to be executed in batches, such as classification, customer support, or text generation. * Supports intermediate tasks that require moderate reasoning capabilities, such as data extraction, summarizing documents, writing emails, writing job descriptions, or writing product descriptions. * Supports complex tasks that require strong reasoning capabilities or are highly specialized, such as synthetic text generation, code generation, RAG, or Agent.

Among its many product series, Mistral AI has achieved remarkable results in its exploration of lightweight and multimodal technologies.

Lightweight model with excellent performance

Mistral AI has launched a number of models that have attracted widespread attention in the industry. Among them, the open-source Mistral 7B model is truly impressive.Although the model has only 7 billion parameters, it has demonstrated performance that surpasses models of the same level.In many complex inference and encoding tasks, the Mistral 7B's performance rivals even models with larger parameter sizes. This lightweight design significantly reduces the model's runtime hardware requirements while significantly improving inference speed, enabling efficient execution on devices with limited computing power. This feature not only meets current demands for optimized device performance and energy consumption, but also expands the application possibilities of AI technology in a wider range of scenarios.
Paper address:https://hyper.ai/papers/2310.06825

On this basis,The improved version of the sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) model Mixtral 8×7B became the most advanced MoE model on Hugging Face at the time.In most authoritative benchmarks, Mixtral 8×7B successfully surpassed well-known closed-source large models such as Llama 2 70B, and achieved an inference speed increase of up to 6 times compared to traditional models. This advantage enables rapid response to user requests in real-world applications, significantly improving the user experience. Under the Apache 2.0 open source license, it surpassed GPT-3.5 Turbo, Claude-2.1, Gemini Pro, and the Llama 2 70B chat model on human benchmarks.
Paper address:https://hyper.ai/papers/2401.04088

Exploration of Multimodal Technology

In addition to its deep expertise in language modeling, Mistral AI is also actively developing multimodal technologies. Its Pixtral Large model successfully integrates image understanding and text generation. In the medical field, this model can analyze and understand medical images, generating diagnostic reports or assisting doctors in diagnosing conditions. In autonomous driving scenarios, it can generate driving decision recommendations based on road imagery captured by cameras. For content creation, users simply input an image, and Pixtral Large generates a relevant text description based on its understanding of the image, providing creative workers with new inspiration. The development of multimodal technologies has expanded the application boundaries of AI, enabling AI to be effective in more complex scenarios and positioning Mistral AI in a competitive and diversified AI market.
Paper address:https://hyper.ai/papers/2410.07073

Unique open source and rich product matrix

In addition to its unique technological advantages, Mistral AI also focuses on the construction of an open source ecosystem and the layout of matrix products.

Open source model to promote community collaboration

Mistral AI has released several key models, such as Mistral 7B and Mixtral, with open-source weights and licensed under the Apache 2.0 open source license. Unlike some AI companies that adhere to a closed-source approach, Mistral AI firmly believes that open source can leverage the wisdom and power of developers worldwide, enabling rapid model iteration and optimization through community collaboration. Within the open source community, developers worldwide can freely access the code and weights of these models, allowing them to conduct secondary development, improvements, and application expansion based on their own needs and creativity, creating a variety of AI applications for diverse scenarios, including intelligent customer service, content creation tools, and educational assistance software.

The problems discovered and improvement suggestions made by developers during use, in turn, promote the continuous optimization and upgrading of Mistral models, forming a virtuous cycle. This open-source model stands in stark contrast to the closed-source approaches of OpenAI and Anthropic. It not only contributes a wealth of valuable code and algorithms to improve model performance and functionality, but also earns Mistral AI a good reputation and broad community support.

Product matrix covering all aspects from developers to enterprises

Mistral AI's extensive product portfolio provides a range of practical tools for developers and businesses. Tools like La Plateforme and Codestral offer comprehensive support from model customization to application development, lowering the barrier to entry for developers using AI technology. These tools not only enable the easy creation of intelligent agents with specific functions, but also allow for personalized model fine-tuning. They even offer free basic completion capabilities, improving code efficiency.

In terms of enterprise services, the intelligent enterprise assistant developed by Mistral AI can automatically handle customer inquiries and answer questions quickly and accurately, significantly improving customer service efficiency and reducing labor costs. For internal process optimization, the intelligent assistant can assist with document processing and improve office efficiency.

Furthermore, the company launched Le Chat, a conversational AI assistant for businesses. Companies can use Le Chat through subscription or licensing, leveraging it to connect with their internal knowledge base and provide customized solutions to their customers. In just 100 days after its launch, Le Chat helped the company quadruple its business scale and achieve significant commercial success.

Analysis of the reasons for favoring Mistral AI

Mistral AI demonstrates distinctive competitiveness from its technology to its model, but this doesn't fully explain the significant investment or acquisition by tech giants like ASML and Apple. Uncovering the underlying logic requires further analysis, combining practical needs with strategic considerations. After reviewing various sources, we offer the following hypotheses.

Make up for Apple's AI technology shortcomings

While Apple has been steadily advancing in the field of AI, its Siri voice assistant has gradually exposed shortcomings such as insufficient natural language understanding and a limited feature set when compared to similar products from competitors such as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. Mistral AI's exceptional language modeling technology, particularly its advanced natural language processing (NLP) capabilities and efficient model architecture, provides Apple with complementary technologies. By acquiring Mistral AI, Apple will quickly gain access to cutting-edge AI technology and a robust R&D team, accelerating the iteration and upgrade of its own AI technology, improving the performance of products like Siri, and strengthening its competitiveness in the AI field.

Furthermore, its rich product portfolio and diverse technology application scenarios can inject new vitality into Apple's product ecosystem. In terms of productivity tools, integrating Mistral AI's AI technology into Apple's office software (such as Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) can enable intelligent document editing and automatic data analysis, improving user efficiency. In the enterprise services sector, leveraging Mistral AI's intelligent enterprise assistant and customized solutions, Apple can further enhance its enterprise-level service offerings (such as iCloud for Enterprise and Apple Business Essentials).

Collaborate with ASML to upgrade the industry

ASML, a global leader in semiconductor manufacturing equipment, is committed to improving the performance and productivity of its lithography systems through technological innovation. In today's digital and intelligent era, artificial intelligence (AI) holds enormous potential for application in semiconductor manufacturing. AI plays a vital role in everything from optimizing lithography equipment design to adjusting and monitoring parameters during production. Through its strategic partnership with Mistral AI, ASML will be able to deeply integrate its advanced AI models and algorithms into its product development, production operations, and customer service. Leveraging AI's powerful data analysis and intelligent decision-making capabilities, ASML is expected to further enhance the performance of core equipment such as EUV lithography machines, achieve more precise lithography processes, shorten equipment development cycles, and reduce production costs, thereby providing more advanced and efficient equipment and solutions for the global semiconductor industry.

Final Thoughts

Although Mistral AI's market value and status are currently booming, it is not without controversy.

In August of this year, a plagiarism scandal erupted. According to a former Mistral AI employee, the company's latest model was apparently directly derived from the DeepSeek model, but was packaged as the result of autonomous reinforcement learning (RL), and even misrepresented benchmark results.

In fact, as early as June 2025, Sam Paech, a professional in the field of AI, discovered through technical analysis that the Mistral-small-3.2 model and DeepSeek-v3 were highly similar in language pattern output, suggesting that the former may have "borrowed" the output style of the latter.

DeepMind researcher Susan Zhang was even more bold and directly pointed out the unethical behavior of Mistral AI.

However, among the many criticisms, there are also voices of support. HuggingFace co-founder and CEO Clement Delangue once said, "Is it wrong to distill open source models?"

Admittedly, distillation technology is a common technique in the AI field, and DeepSeek does not prohibit such operations. However, Mistral AI's deliberate concealment of technical connections and exaggeration of its own R&D achievements have still raised questions in the industry about its technical integrity.

Despite this controversy, Mistral AI's investment value remains recognized by industry giants. Some speculate that there's a deeper industry logic behind this: the fundamental reason for investment is that it's the only reputable model currently available in Europe, and everyone is betting on its potential replacement should the EU restrict US models for some reason. Currently, US companies dominate the global AI landscape, leveraging their technological first-mover advantage and ecosystem expertise. Models from companies like OpenAI and Google virtually monopolize the mid- to high-end market. As a major global tech market and regulatory body, the EU has been tightening its oversight of AI technology in recent years. Whether through the introduction of the "Artificial Intelligence Act" or stringent requirements for data security and algorithm transparency, these regulations demonstrate a wariness of reliance on external AI technology. If the EU were to impose restrictions on US AI models in the future, driven by concerns about data security and industry independence, the European market would face a shortage of high-quality AI models.

Against this backdrop, Mistral AI, as one of the few European companies capable of competing with top international models, has naturally become a "backup option" in the eyes of capital. Investors value not only its technological strength, but also its strategic value as a "European benchmark." In essence, it is preparing for the upcoming geopolitical technology game. This insecurity stemming from "replacement anxiety" is one of the key drivers behind the surge in Mistral AI's valuation.

Despite ongoing controversy and skepticism, it's undeniable that Mistral AI has become a significant player in Europe's AI landscape. Whether Mistral AI can truly realize its technological potential and find a balance within the complex market and policy landscape remains to be seen.

References:
1.https://mistral.ai/models
2.https://huggingface.co/blog/zh/mixtral