French artificial intelligence leader Mistral AI today announced it has raised €1.7 billion, about $2 billion, in a Series C funding round led by Dutch semiconductor equipment manufacturer ASML Holding NV.

The round more than doubles Mistral’s $6 billion valuation, which it achieved during a $640 million round led by General Catalyst last year, to around $13.7 billion. Nvidia Corp., DST Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Bpifrance, General Catalyst, Index Ventures and Lightspeed also participated in the round.

Mistral AI is one of the most prominent European AI developers with advanced multilingual large language models and is considered a rival to United States-based AI firms such as Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Google LLC’s Gemini. The company’s own chatbot, Le Chat, has received multiple updates that make it a direct competitor, such as the addition of deep research, image editing and voice mode.

Le Chat’s voice mode is powered by Voxtral, Mistral’s open source, state-of-the-art speech understanding AI foundation model that the company says outperforms OpenAI’s Whisper model.

In May, the company launched Mistral Medium 3, a cost-performance optimized model that outperforms Meta Platforms Inc.’s Llama 4 Maverick and enterprise solutions like Cohere Inc.’s Command A. Less than a month later, the company introduced Mistral Code, a developer-focused assistant designed to run inside code editors. Mistral also debuted Magistral, the company’s lineup of reasoning-optimized AI models, in June, which makes the company competitive within the current trend of “thinking” style AI foundation models.

To train and run powerful large language models, many AI companies must forge deep partnerships with specialized infrastructure and chip companies to provide them with the foundation to build out data centers and AI capabilities. ASML manufactures lithography equipment that enables major companies such as Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Intel Corp. and Apple Inc. to produce the advanced chips essential for their product lines.

ASML Chief Executive Christophe Fouquet commented that the strategic partnership with Mistral will lead to “generate clear benefits for ASML customers through innovative products and solutions,” and drive potential joint research to gain traction in the future.

Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch said the investment from ASML will empower the entire technology chain from the development of AI to the engineering of the infrastructure it runs on.

“We have the ambition to help ASML and its numerous partners solve current and future engineering challenges through AI, and ultimately to advance the full semiconductor and AI value chain,” said Mensch.

As part of the investment, ASML Chief Financial Officer Roger Dassen will assume a role on Mistral’s strategic committee board.

Image: SiliconANGLE / Mistral AI Le Chat