Nice, also note that ASML is a big investor in Mistral AI, which made the industrial AI ambitions already more credible. https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2025/asml-mistra...

ASML is the flashy, public-facing partner. Mistral is also working with the French government and defense industry for applications that are unlikely to be publicly announced, but are bound to bring in much more money.

The European-sovereignty angle is what makes Mistral's strategy harder to read from the outside. If a meaningful share of revenue comes from EU government and defense contracts, the public benchmarks against OpenAI/Anthropic stop being the right scoreboard — they're optimizing for different procurement rules and a different definition of "trustworthy." Curious if anyone has visibility into how those contracts are structured: per-seat, on-prem, or something closer to hosted with sovereign keys?

can you explain how it makes it more credible? is the assertion that asml is using mistral as part of its research/manufacturing?

From the link:

"...a long-term collaboration agreement to explore the use of AI models across ASML’s product portfolio as well as research, development and operations..."

ASML is one of the clients Mistral keeps referencing, for example here: https://mistral.ai/news/forge But it isn't clear exactly what they've been doing together. The Forge page only mentions they "train models on the proprietary data that powers their most complex systems and future-defining technologies."

ASML is one of the bigger investor of Mistral

https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ai-raises-1-7-b-to-accelerat...

ASML knows like no other the importance of doing research in secrecy.

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the assertion is that the people at asml are likely in a good position to assess ai use in complex industry

It doesn’t

ASML’s EUV money printer has nothing to do with their ability to deploy that money in illiquid investments instead of to their own shareholders

ASML buying equity in one company in tangentially related industry (just because they’re in Europe and the pickings are slim in both offerings and growth capital) has nothing to do with any synergy or integration with ASML’s utility (and bottleneck) to the chip supply chain

remember when you were studying for standardized tests as a teenager? this is what the high scoring answer would be

A friend of mine works for ASML and it’s suggested they were nudged quite heavily “from above” to make this investment, rather than it being an actual strategic play by ASML. Basically “sovereign EU AI” is the play here.

a cursory understanding of the subcontinent's abysmal venture capital ecosystem and bloc wide risk aversion would have anyone reach the same conclusion