ASML Invests €1.3bn in AI Company Mistral
quietus writes:
ASML, Dutch multinational producer of EUV lithography machines, has announced an investment of 1.3bn in French AI startup Mistral, which positions itself as an European alternative to ChatGPT and similar.
It is to become "a long-term collaboration agreement to explore the use of AI models across ASML's product portfolio as well as research, development and operations, to benefit ASML customers with faster time to market and higher performance holistic lithography systems ..." in a "first-of-its-kind partnership between a semiconductor equipment manufacturer and a leading AI company".
The deal brings together Europe's top AI start-up and one of the continent's most valuable public companies, which supplies the equipment to make the advanced chips that are used to train and run AI models.
Arthur Mensch, current CEO of Mistral, was quoted by the Financial Times as saying that "it's important for European companies not to have too much dependency on US technology", while his counterpart at ASML claimed that sovereignty was an additional benefit, but they didn't "pick Mistral because they were European", rather because AI will become "a strategic technology ... I think this will help the European ecosystem, but we do it because it's good for Mistral and it's good for ASML.".
In the short term, he claimed, ASML would begin using Mistral's AI expertise to help develop new chipmaking tools, as well as offering customers new capabilities as they use its existing systems. "We started to look for a partner, because we thought that this is not something we should try to do ourselves ...the company's expertise is in chipmaking equipment and we are not AI experts".
In case you're groaning now while reaching for that special bottle of whisky under your desk, labeled peak AI hype, there was an intriguing comment on the Interwebs about the true purpose of the deal.
AI companies like Mistral use specialised wafer-scale chips from Cerebras in their data centres. Hardware acceleration and software optimisation partly explain why Mistral's models are so fast. Were ASML to diversify and pull that kind of silicon-software codesign into its own stack (computational lithography, metrology and field service) the benefits are obvious: faster OPC/ILT runs, smarter tool control, and ontool copilots that digest logs and manuals in real time. That's probably the logic behind ASML's 1.3bn move for a stake in Mistral and a strategic partnership: it's product synergy, not flagwaving--even if the new CEO happens to be French.
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