While they might have seen some synergy with Mistral, it might also be a complete strategic and/or political investment. Mistral is the only serious "AI" company in the EU right now (if you exclude company working on the hardware side). It will very likely get a lot of support from the EU to be able to stay in the race with the U.S and China, and in a case of a IA market crash, the EU would also probably like for Mistral to have enough finance to be able to be one of the company that will survive.

By funding Mistral, ASML might be able to buy a lot of political favor, while having stakes in a company that is unlikely to completely fail in the near future due to the EU administration support.

What’s the actual synergy here? The closest angle I can imagine is that AI workloads drive demand for more chips, but I believe ASML is already selling everything it can make.

Maybe the best tech news of the year IMHO.

Mistral previously partnered with Cerebras on Le Chat: https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/mistral-le-chat

I'm quite surprised that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic appear to have done a similar deal. Their inference is slow in comparison - like 5.10x slower than what Cerebras can achieve.

Google have their own TPUs which seem to be giving them a performance edge. Google AI mode is lightning fast in comparison to GPT-5 Thinking search for result equality that looks to be in the same ballpark.

... that said, on reading the linked press release there's actually no mention of model performance at all:

> 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.

If this doesn’t do it, I don’t know what…

I’m eager to see this one because Mistral models actually perform pretty well against top tiers in their class. It’s just that since 2025 they’ve been kinda small. Like, Mistral Medium 3.1 is probably a decent competitor to Google Gemini 2.0 or 2.5 Flash, but they have nothing against Pro.

If they release a large model later this year, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’ll be quite competitive for EU users. They’re pretty close to that threshold now that other large models are plateauing! It’s kinda tantalizing how close!

Personally I see this investment as much more political than technical. ASML wants to be a real 'European' champion; not just Dutch. The Dutch and German government are on board; now the French are too.

See also: new CEO is French.

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.

I don’t know much about lithography which is why I ask - what is an AI supposed to do in a lithography machine? Does anyone know?

Mistral is about the only credible EU contender in the LLM space, and has been not just vocal but also in its actions very much in favor of transparancy and openness.

Interesting how these two cultures will collide.

"In the long run, all AI models will be similar. It's about how you use the models in a well-protected environment. We will never allow our data and that of our customers to leave ASML. So a partner must be willing to work with us and adapt its model to our needs. Not only did Mistral want to do that, it is also their business model."

https://fd.nl/bedrijfsleven/1569378/asml-ceo-strategische-au...

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Full article translated:

“A good reason to collaborate.” That's how ASML's CEO described his company's remarkable €1.3 billion investment in French AI company Mistral on Wednesday. Since the investment was leaked by Reuters on Sunday, there has been much speculation about ASML's reasons for investing in the European challenger to giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Analysts and commentators pointed to the geopolitical implications or the strong French link between the companies. But according to ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet, the reason was purely business. “Sovereignty has never been the goal.”

Mistral AI is a start-up founded in 2023 that specializes in building large language models. The French CEO of ASML and Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch met at an AI summit in Paris earlier this year and decided to work together to use Mistral's models to further improve ASML's chip machines.

Surprising investment

Each ASML machine generates approximately 1 terabyte of data per day. “Our machines are very complex,” Fouquet explains in an interview with the FD. "We have highly advanced control systems on our machines to enable them to operate very quickly and with great accuracy. The amount of data our machines generate gives us the opportunity to use AI. With the current software and machine learning models, we are limited in what we can do with the data and how quickly we can adjust the machine,“ says the CEO. ”AI is the next step in making better use of all that data."

ASML has invested in other companies in the past, such as German lens manufacturer Zeiss and Eindhoven-based photonics company Smart Photonics, but those were either suppliers or potential customers. Mistral is neither.

Running AI models in-house

According to the ASML CEO, the Dutch company's investment in Mistral stems from the conviction that both companies can create value together. If Mistral becomes more valuable as a result of the collaboration, ASML can benefit from that.

ASML is the main investor in a new €1.7 billion financing round for Mistral. This makes Mistral an important AI player in Europe, but small compared to its American rivals. OpenAI raised $40 billion in its latest round alone. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude program, which is popular among programmers, just closed a $13 billion round.

“European sovereignty was not the goal”

According to Fouquet, the reason for the collaboration lies primarily in the way Mistral develops its AI models. “In the long run, all AI models will be similar. It's about how you use the models in a well-protected environment,” says Fouquet. “We will never allow our data and that of our customers to leave ASML. So a partner must be willing to work with us and adapt its model to our needs. Not only did Mistral want to do that, it is also their business model.”

According to Fouquet, the collaboration is not motivated by a desire for greater European sovereignty. “That was not the goal. But if it contributes to that, we are happy,” says Fouquet.

ASML supports EU initiatives to strengthen the chip sector in Europe, but always maintains a politically neutral stance in the geopolitical struggle between the United States, China, and the European Union. This is understandable, as the company has major customers in all regions, such as TSMC in Taiwan, SK Hynix in South Korea, SMIC in China, and Intel in the US.

“Two birds with one stone”

Although ASML itself does not play the European card, some analysts and politicians do see such a motive for the collaboration with Mistral. “Thousands of large companies worldwide make extensive use of AI in their product development by using the services of OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Google, Mistral, without investing in these companies,” writes investment bank Jefferies in a commentary. “We also do not believe that ASML needed an investment in an AI company to benefit from AI models in its lithography products. In our view, the investment stems primarily from geopolitical motives to support and develop a European AI company and ecosystem,” the bank states.

Wouter Huygen, CEO of AI consultancy Rewire, also sees a clear link to European sovereignty. “ASML is known for taking internal technology development very far. It is therefore quite understandable that ASML is taking this step: access to and influence on the development of a strategic technology. Plus European sovereignty. That's two birds with one stone.”

The current pace of meh models releases and everyone converging on the same quality of tech can’t sustain the number of players and valuations out there. Not even close. Even the AI grifters on LinkedIn are running out of grifting steam.

[edit: nevermind, I speculated before reading the announcement. Reality is much more boring than that]