Samsung Electronics said on Sept. 9 it signed a strategic partnership with French artificial intelligence company Mistral AI. The two companies agreed to jointly develop an in-house AI model specialised in semiconductor design and manufacturing. The approach combines semiconductor technology and manufacturing data accumulated by Samsung Electronics’ DS division with Mistral AI’s high-efficiency model technology.

Mistral AI is a company founded by an AI research team led by CEO Arthur Mensch (아르튀르 멘쉬) and researchers formerly at Google DeepMind and Meta. It is considered one of the companies representing the European AI ecosystem. It has served industries that require high levels of data security, such as finance, manufacturing and energy. Its track record of building models tailored to those industries formed the background for this cooperation.

Mistral AI’s technology is designed for on-premise environments, where companies build and run AI models on internal infrastructure such as their own servers and data centres instead of external cloud services. Samsung Electronics will use solutions including 'Mistral Large', a large language model that learns from vast documents to understand and generate language, to develop its own model tailored to DS division-specific data.

The model will be rolled out in stages at semiconductor design and manufacturing sites. Areas of application include data analysis, defect prediction and process optimisation. Samsung Electronics plans to shorten development periods and raise manufacturing efficiency and quality. The two companies will also build an AI platform and operating system tailored to semiconductor work alongside the AI model.

The model will be implemented on an on-premise basis that runs on Samsung Electronics’ internal infrastructure. This is to use semiconductor data classified as national core technology without transferring it externally. Samsung Electronics said it can secure both technology competitiveness and data security.

The companies also made a large-scale equity investment to strengthen their cooperative relationship. Through the equity investment, the two companies secured a foundation to pursue long-term technical cooperation and joint business. Samsung Electronics plans to expand the cooperation across the DS division, including memory, foundry and logic. It set a goal of building an AI-based semiconductor ecosystem that also links customers and partners in the future. It also aims to identify AI use cases suited to the semiconductor industry and expand the scope of cooperation to the global market.

Jun Young-hyun (전영현), head of Samsung Electronics’ DS division, said, "As the complexity of semiconductor design and manufacturing is rising rapidly, AI capabilities that can safely and precisely use vast amounts of data are emerging as a key competitiveness." He added, "Together with Mistral AI, we will build AI models and platforms specialised in the semiconductor industry and create a new standard for AI-based semiconductor innovation."

Arthur Mensch (아르튀르 멘쉬), founder and CEO of Mistral AI, said, "From semiconductors to software, AI is redefining the creation of advanced technology." He added, "We are pleased to be able to cooperate with Samsung Electronics based on Mistral AI’s semiconductor capabilities, and through the cooperation we want to contribute to progress across semiconductor design, manufacturing and the global AI value system."