ASML gross revenue was 28B€ in 2024, and their net income was 7.5B€. While 1.3B€ (the amount ASML invested in this 1.7B€ fund raise) is not pocket change, it is also an amount that ASML can not afford to lose.
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.
I dunno if ASML is lacking any political favor that Mistral can give them, they are already one of the most critical companies for Europe and the entire western supply chain.
There is a possibility this is a step towards building a full-stack all-EU AI - if AI delivers on the hype, the EU will certainly want to have one they fully control without dependency on either the US or China. But this would mean having an EU-based alternative to both TSMC and NVIDIA as well, and it's hard to see how that happens. It probably looks something like the EU passing its own CHIPS act to open TSMC-run fabs on EU soil, making Nvidia chips that are then allocated to Mistral; there is non-EU IP there but the whole operation can at least take place on EU soil.
Some business are looking ahead long term. Others aren't. It wouldn't be novel for a company like ASML to just stay focused no the goose with the golden egg, look at Intel (Pentium etc.) And then there's business that have some sort of long-term strategy, but just won't go all in, and end up with subpar acquisitions; I worked for Verizon: BlueJeans anyone? Or AOL? And those were just part of a pattern.
I just want to remind our overseas friends that the EU is not a country and Mistral is French company. The EU rarely bets on a single firm in a single country, there are always 26 unhappy countries when something like that is about to happen ;)
I am European and I do agree that we should support the European companies but such decision are always results of lengthy deliberations.
Does anyone know if there is any company that is proactively supported by the EU?
I am from the E.U :) . I also work for public administrations and have close relative working for E.U administrations, so I do have some knowledge about how the beast operate.
> The EU rarely bets on a single firm in a single country
Indeed, except when they do. While the various E.U administrations like to usually create funds that are distributed with grants (which are rarely evenly distributed evenly amongst the member mind you), there is sometime where they do invest in one horse. This is usually in high-tech, high-capital sector tho', like Airbus, Arianespace, where there is only a very few competitor, and the chance of having new one is very low has the investment in time and money to get a business up and running would be basically only feasible by a state.
So I don't think Mistral is that (yet at least). But it is still the only company operating at this level in the E.U (for now), making it a decent bet for ASML. Plus, as many pointed out, there is also the French connection :D
Both Airbus and Arianespace are quite distributed across the EU. While this seems to have worked fine for Airbus, it does not seem to work that well for space launchers under the Ariannespace umbrella - though some bits of the Ariane 6 & Vega C are built here in the Czech republic for example. So you can see some new programs that support small orbital launcher companies regardless of geographic distribution, just based on results.
Pointlessly pedantic. Everyone knows EU is not a country. Also, ASML and Mistral are from two different countries.
That aside, since the Draghi report last year (which was primarily about the innovation gap between the EU/US specifically in tech) and the overall lackluster economic projections, EU officials have been very vocal about losing out to the US (and this time China) in yet another race in a fledgling innovation.
There is without a doubt some level of influence & assurances from the EU behind this deal.
The EU has a very long history of killing entrepreneurship. It is not a coincidence the largest and more innovative companies in the planet are not from Europe despite having both the financial and human resources. This is very unlikely to change now, particularly in a domain so sensitive to data privacy like AI for which the EU parliament is very quick and efficient in launching new and more restrictive regulations. Thinking they are going to have a change of heart now is pretty naive. What ASML is doing is buying a seat in the AI train. They can now flex they are an AI company, and some investors love that. That’s all this is, forget about Mistral being critical to ASML R&D, it is not. Siemens would have been a much better fit for Mistral and vice versa, but that ship already sailed as Siemens is heavily integrated with OpenAI and Azure in the digital factory space.
What would have to change for you to consider it a country? It has a government, there has been talk of a European Army. It has a sovereign currency. If it is the squabbling between constituent states: hello from Canada! Check out our politics.
>What would have to change for you to consider it a country?
For one, having the leader be actually elected by the people and not second hand appointed by corruptible politicians.
And that would never work because then voters would just choose a candidate on the criteria of being of the same nationality as them, rather than on policies, which highlights the EU's biggest fault: the massive cultural divide, and people don't like being ruled by someone who isn't of their own culture because then they can't empathize with them, which is 100% valid point, as what would a German royal like Ursula who grew up in UK boarding schools with private security, understand about the life that someone in Greece, Romania or Bulgaria have when she makes deals and policies that negativity affect the least fortunate, like on energy?
And for two, a mandatory common language. Because over 70% of Airbus Jobs at Toulouse HQ are in French. Same for other companies and countries. So in theory you have job mobility, but in practice it's highly limited if you don't speak the local language.
>there has been talk of a European Army.
Since when do talks equal anything in reality? What can I do with talks? Can I spend them? If politicians' talks were cookies I'd have died of diabetes 500x by now.
There will be no EU army since, just like my previous point, not only do citizens of France won't want to be controlled by a German general, and vice versa, but also all EU countries have their own different geopolitical interests, often in conflict with other members.
So we'll just have mutual defense agreements whose practical enforcement will always be questionable when shit actually hits the fan, because it's easy for politicians to write mutual defense cheques, but when they have to ask their citizens to go die in another country especially a country they don't have cultural ties or fondness towards, those cheques become very hard to cash.
> For one, having the leader be actually elected by the people and not second hand appointed by corruptible politicians.
That's a strange requirement considering the executive of most EU states is not directly elected by people either. Do you not consider Germany or Italy to be countries?
> That's a strange requirement considering the executive of most EU states is not directly elected by people either
At least, it's usually the leader of the party the people voted for in the legislative elections.
In the EU there was this Spitzenkandidat idea floating around ten years ago, but it was never enacted in texts and died at the first opportunity (naming Von der Leyen back in 2019 when she wasn't the leader of the PPE), because the heads of members states (particularly the French) weren't willing to give up their designation power.
In practice there isn't even European political parties, the European elections are just national elections represented by national parties and most citizens don't even know the names of the European coalition of parties (PSOE, PPE, Renew, etc…).
Depends. What is a country? The land borders? The people? The government? The leader? If you take out all the Germans out of Germany and replace them with other people is it still Germany?
My point was that accountable democracy requires direct vote from the people and not via second hand, not that Germany or Italy aren't countries. And if EU wishes to be a country it needs that level of direct accountability which is impossible.
Otherwise if you force it it's gonna be another Yugoslavia or USSR where most people are pissed because they're not being ruled by someone of their own culture that they can directly vote for.
These forced multi-culti nation states under one roof abominations don't work. It's been known since the Tower of Babel yet the elite ruling class think this time it will be different because it worked in the US, a country younger than most universities in Europe.
> Depends. What is a country? The land borders? The people? The government? The leader? If you take out all the Germans out of Germany and replace them with other people is it still Germany?
Theseus' ship? Isn't that "Umvolkung" nonsense again? Philosophy, political sciences, and law have have rummaged about these questions for the last few centuries and have developed some pretty good answers. Of course, they are mostly not simple and all too long and intricate for this forum, but I guess you can pick up any modern book on theory of the state to get your answers.
But I get the distinct notion that you have a certain idea what a country, state, or nation is, considering the conflation with culture, and it is not very embracing of pluralism. I'd wager you'd like Schmidt, maybe Zippelius, but not Böckenförde.
> What would have to change for you to consider it a country?
Almost as many things as what you'd have to change to consider the UN a country.
> It has a government
No it doesn't. The Commission isn't a government, it has no autonomy from the member states as it takes it's orientations directly from the European Council, which is the meeting of the heads of all member states.
> there has been talk of a European Army
There has been talk about fusion power for decades as well, we know it's not happening anytime soon (creating a European army would require all 27 member states to enact a new treaty replacing the current ones, this hasn't been done since they were 15 and the adoption of the previous one was very chaotic and left deep scares). Also, it's very unlikely to happen since there are too much diverging interests (the Baltic and former eastern states being too reliant on US security guarantees, France being too attached to its strategic independence and Hungary being straight up aligned on Moscow).
> It has a sovereign currency
No it doesn't… There is a common currency between some of the member states, but not all of them.
> If it is the squabbling between constituent states: hello from Canada!
Since you are from the other side of the Atlantic I don't blame you for not understanding this well (as I said, most European don't), but the EU really is as close to international organization like the UN as it is from Federal countries.
It has some federal components (like the fact that their is a legislative process to enact laws that are immediately applicable in member states without ratification) but it lacks a good part of it: no army as said above, but also no justice system, more importantly no autonomous budget (the budget is mostly decided by the European Council, the Parliament having pretty much no weight in the process) no ability to raise taxes (with the exception of tariffs, all of Europe's revenue is made of member states contributions, and even tariffs are raised by member states administration on behalf of the EU which doesn't have it's own capabilities). More strikingly it doesn't have a territory of its own: its territory is made of the territory of member states and they can unilaterally change it without the EU having a say on the matter. Two example:
- had Scotland gained its independence through referendum a decade ago, it would have automatically left the EU because it's not the territory or the people that belongs to the EU but the member states (Scotland could have re-joined later as a new member state, but there's no process for splitting a member state without one part leaving the EU, like the UN, see China).
- France has territories that aren't part of the EU, but it can unilaterally change their status to make them part of it (and did for Mayotte 15 years ago) or the other way around, and the EU has no say in the matter.
All that to say that EU isn't a country, it's a “unidentified political object” (this is a quote from former head of the European Commission Jacques Delors).
I think the meaning behind this confusing-ass phrase is, "It's an investment that ASM cannot miss out on making" ('amount' is a brain-teaser to throw you off the intended meaning)
"While 1.3B€ is not pocket change, it is also an amount that ASML can not afford to lose." - The sentence is framed like a contrast but then instead it says the same thing twice.
I’ll see your pedantry and raise you ... more pedantry. The sentence may be a bit clunky, but there’s nothing grammatically wrong with it. And you’re leaving out the first sentence, which frames the comparison:
> ASML gross revenue was 28B€ in 2024, and their net income was 7.5B€. While 1.3B€ (the amount ASML invested in this 1.7B€ fund raise) is not pocket change, it is also an amount that ASML can not afford to lose.
Worded another way:
> ASML had a healthy margin of 7.5B€ on 28B€ in gross revenue in 2024. 1.3B€ isn’t a huge chunk of this, relatively speaking, but *it’s also an amount that ASML can’t afford to lose.*
There was nothing in the comment that you reply to suggesting that it was grammatically wrong: "The sentence is framed like a contrast but then instead it says the same thing twice." If anything it suggests it's semantically wrong.
language exists to convey a shared concept, you don’t think the sentence means “it’s a lot of money for ASML to risk losing?” and wouldn’t have been mentioned if it meant inconsequential or small?
>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.
With regards to the topic of political favor, this is an interesting read on where US government went to the Dutch government to pressure ASML in buying Mapper, which was at risk being auctioned off to China. The article is in Dutch so a translation might be necessary by your favorite translation tool:
https://archive.is/jmpmU
> Mistral is the only serious "AI" company in the EU right now (if you exclude company working on the hardware side).
While Mistral is the one directly in the front of the Frontier LLM race at the moment, I would encourage you to also look at DeepL and Proton. They both actually have a sophisticated and significant setups for model research and deployment.
Its not a "Europe" issue alone but even more locally.
Saying this as a IT guy, we had way too many talks with banks about IT projects that in the US will have been way easier. But in specific EU countries was constantly met with "amazon does that, why bother" type of comments. Even on governmental level, talking about "innovative investments", it was like talking to walls.
As you expect, a lot of companies (and people) left the European countries to go to the US, because it was WAY easier to get investments going there.
If you already have the money, its one thing, but starting fresh in Europe is just silly.
There are now much, MUCH more support projects in local and EU level, but its often too little, and more in the "sure, you do not need to pay taxes for X years, or we give you a small amount".
But if you ever worked in IT, its those initial investments that are the hardest (material, people) until you get a actual product and with the right marketing. And that support comes not even close.
Do i sound bitter? lol
Now, the US is not exactly going down a great phase. If your into LLMs, sure but the rest has been rather mheh for a while.
My experience in Europe is that investors look for teams of three: a CEO, a CTO, and one more person whose full-time job for the first two years will be filling out funding applications. That's a 50% overhead from day one.
Is that really different from the US, where instead of (or in addition to) doing funding applications it's schmoozing with potential investors? Hacker News over the years has had tons of posts about getting investors interested, or "growth hacking" to make the numbers look better for said investors, and of course then there's going public which is the ultimate "looking for investors".
But I suppose the main difference is private sector vs government.
One difference is that the investors expect their money to be matched by some grant, so you have to do the work twice. The grants take into consideration investments, so it's basically part of the system.
It's very simple to found a company in the US that has access to the entire 50 states and all of the investors therein, with a single/simple accounting to manage. And you don't have to live in the US to do it.
Europe/EU/EEA don't have a comparable setup. Found in one country, deal with workers in many, filings in all of the countries you're doing business, and more.
The new proposed EU Incorporation would go a long way to lowering the bar for getting started and accessing pools of funds between investors in different countries.
Has anyone thought about starting a "meta company" which attempts to provide a cross-national "compatibility layer" for doing business all across the EU?
For example, you could fill out a single set of paperwork, and then paperwork gets automatically generated for each individual country you want to do business in.
I don’t know how the difficulty compares to the EU, but US states require a bunch of per-state filings if you’re hiring employees that live there, in addition to the different tax regimes.
yeah but he’s talking about receiving investment right now
the employment and payroll tax situation is easily handled by third parties like payroll companies. none of the jurisdictions are that different with conflicting legal systems
If Europe carbon-copied the same regulatory framework as the US, do you think the rest of the world would start pouring trillions of euros into the financial sector, like with the USD? A global currency reserve hegemony empire is a very different thing from a treaty-based coalition of random countries. Look at Canada right next door is doing, and their GDP/capita based on the CAD. The only serious competition is another currency hegemon, China. This is not a coincidence. The same was true historically with the British and even Dutch empires.
You mean the continent that invented pretty much everything you're using to write this post, including electric machines, computers and the world wide web?
From context, I doubt they are saying that Europe has zero innovation — they’re likely trying to complain about current rules and regulations stifling innovation and progress today. No one thinks Europe has done nothing worthwhile, ever…
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.