🟢 ASML’s investment in Mistral is about Europe, hype, and scaling opportunities

By now, you've probably heard about Mistral, and if you weren't on vacation this summer, you might have caught the rumors about Apple possibly buying them out. Rumors that sparked some preemptive outrage from French pundits, raising the flag of national sovereignty...

It turns out that yesterday ASML announced investing €1.3 billion in Mistral, with €600 million as equity (buying a stake in the company) and €700 million in cloud computing credits to support Mistral's training and deployment of AI models, making it both a financial and infrastructure-backed partnership.

You might remember that three years ago, I was pointing out the uniqueness of ASML in Europe:

ASML is indisputably one of the most strategic companies embodying Europe's technology leadership, probably more than any other one. In terms of structure, manufacturing, R&D, and net operating income, it's pretty comparable to Airbus in many ways. There's one key difference: unlike Airbus, AMSL is not even in a duopoly stand-off with another significant competitor. No, ASML's worldwide market share in the semi-conductor lithography industry is about 90%. As such, they are the upstream key bottleneck to producing most worldwide electronic devices and appliances, computers, cars, etc.

So, what to do about this deal between these two EU companies?