Mistral's $3.5B Raise, Samsung Profit up 18x from AI Memory

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Samsung is set to post an 18x profit jump because of AI memory demand. Mistral AI is looking at a $3.5 billion raise and a $23 billion valuation. Their revenue has hit over $400 million, and Mid Journey is asking Disney, Universal and Warner Brothers to disclose their own AI use because there's a bunch of lawsuits and everyone is accusing Mid Journey of using copyrighted content. So they're trying to flip the tables here. Station F's FAI Accelerator is coming back. Their first cohort got $34 million in pre-seed funding and we're going to see what's happening next there. Fable 5 has just reached the top of the kernel bench mega. That is a benchmark. And this is at the same time that AI agents are quadrupling going 4x on real freelance work, what they're actually able to accomplish. So we're going to talk about some of the capabilities of Fable 5, what this new benchmark is saying. Currently Claude Cowork is my absolute favorite tool for getting things done, being able to tell it to accomplish a task and it being able to control your Chrome browser, use all of the files on your computer and basically get everything done that you need to with logged in sessions is absolutely incredible. Adding MCPs is the best thing I've ever been able to do for it. The only problem with Claude is that it doesn't have image, audio or video AI capabilities. Of course it's super smart and great at code, but I need so many different assets for all of my projects that I'm working on, whether I'm making websites and I need images inside of them, or I'm doing ads and I need video creation for all of that. Or if I'm doing things with podcasting, I have a lot of AI autonomous podcast projects, and I need audio. I built an MCP for my startup AI Box.AI that lets you get all of the audio, image and video right inside of Claude. So this morning, I was talking to Claude, I needed to make a podcast cover for something, and I said go use the AI Box image generator, use OpenAI image 1.5, which could say anything, right? You could say Gemini 3.5 Pro, whatever. And I said go and make an image, go make a podcast cover, and I explained exactly the prompt that I was used for making podcast covers. It just used the MCP, connected to AI Box, generated the image, gave me a link, and I could go download it immediately. This is the biggest unlock for Claude. If you want to try out the MCP that I've created for Claude, go to AIBox.AI slash Claude. I'll leave that in the description, and you get access to all of that for like $8 a month. You can have all of the image, audio, video inside of Claude. Call it at any time with AI Box's MCP. It's absolutely incredible, super useful, and I hope that unlocks Claude for you. Samsung is expecting to have profits that are 18 times higher than they were a year ago, and of course, the biggest reason is AI, but specifically, the demand has exploded for something called high bandwidth memory, or HBM. So essentially, you could think of this as ultra fast memory, and it's stacked into layers and attached directly into AI chips.
NVIDIA and AMD are both using this. So this is like memory that's bolted straight onto their processors, and it essentially lets AI models process tons of data really fast. It gives them that speed. So a couple of years ago, the entire memory industry had completely crashed. I think 2023 to 2024 prices were falling because there was way too much supply, so they basically overbuilt. But then, all of a sudden, we had this perfect moment where OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, all of them started buying up AI hardware in just insane quantities, hundreds of thousands of chips at a time. And so the whole market has switched now. All of a sudden, instead of this big oversupply that we had before, we now have a massive undersupply. And so the market is skyrocketing, and any of these companies that are building this memory are making a ton of money. So Samsung was initially behind, I think, the biggest competitor, which is SK Hynix. This is from South Korea, and I think I've talked about them on other podcasts before, but they are also benefitting from this a ton. And so now Samsung is kind of coming right behind them.
Now they are ramping up production, and there's two things in particular. There's the HBM4, and that's basically becoming one of the biggest drivers of their kind of financial boom that they're seeing right now. That one's really popular. And the reason why this matters is that the HBM is super profitable. It sells for way more than any traditional compute memory, and only three companies in the world can manufacture at scale. So Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, which I think Micron is out of Idaho, and I've also talked about them on the podcast before, because they are absolutely blowing up. So there's really just three main companies that are making this right now, and it's really hard to manufacture this at scale. So all of them are growing in a crazy amount. Micron is not a company, I think, that was a household name, but it's becoming one of the biggest companies in the world because of just this huge supply pinch and shortage, and so the prices are just going up a ton. Samsung is also trying to become less dependent on memory, they're going to be expanding into custom AI chips. They're also reportedly in discussions right now with Anthropic about building specialized AI processors, and they said specifically that they want to grow their semiconductor manufacturing business as well. So I mean, right now, obviously it's super exciting for them, they're seeing a ton of benefit from all of the memory exploding, but they know that this isn't going to last forever probably, so the diversification is a pretty smart move. Mistral AI right now is looking to raise $3.5 billion at a $23 billion valuation, and that is nearly double its September 2025 Series C price. So they're based in France, if you didn't know already, and their recurring revenue just hit $400 million in February. That's about 20x the $20 million that they had a year ago, which is pretty crazy. And I think what's interesting about them in particular is we hear talk a lot, I think especially after Trump kind of banned Fable 5 or the Trump administration, whatever, had to get pulled back for a little bit before it went out. We had a lot of different players, especially in Europe, talking about AI sovereignty and AI infrastructure more than I think I've seen other places. And I've had some of the big founders from Coheer on the podcast who talks a lot about that as well. But I think AI sovereignty is a huge deal for countries that are not in the United States, and they want to make sure that they're putting their investments into companies that will help them achieve that. And Mistral is a good one because they have open source models so people can run those locally inside their own country with data centers inside their own country and really get that quote unquote AI sovereignty that a lot of these companies are, our countries are looking for. Right now Mistral says that they're targeting $1 billion in annual occurring revenue this year, and they're committing $4 billion to build data centers in France, Sweden, and they're also launching Mistral Compute, which is an European Nvidia powered platform, and they're going to be doing that this year, following after what it seems like XAI and OpenAI and Google and all of them are kind of doing with their compute platforms. They have acquired a bunch of infrastructure startups. One in particular is called Cayob. They have a joint venture with MGX, Nvidia and BPI France to build an AI campus near Paris. I think they're really trying to show, and I think Paris and France in general is really trying to show that they are kind of the center for AI.