Back in the day, French financial institutions and strategic companies would merrily take equity stakes in one another creating a noyau dur (hard core) of supportive shareholders to deter piratical Anglo-Saxon predators.
The €1.3bn investment this week by Dutch tech company ASML in the French AI start-up Mistral has a similar, slightly retro, feel to it — albeit on a European scale. The deal deepens the relationship between two of Europe’s most impressive tech companies. It will also be cheered by European politicians championing the region’s tech sovereignty. Yet in the global scheme of artificial intelligence, where some investments in the US have been orders of magnitude bigger, the deal may barely register.
Unquestionably, ASML is one of the world’s most extraordinary tech companies. It manufactures highly complex industrial equipment, including its $400mn extreme ultraviolet lithography machines used to make state-of-the-art semiconductors. The Dutch company spent €6bn over 17 years developing the technology, which can print nanoscopic blueprints on to silicon chips, giving it an almost impregnable market position.