AI Markets: Mistral raises 3 billion, Anthropic picks up the pace, SpaceX unlocks

A double win for European and American AI this week: while Mistral brings chipmakers onto its cap table, SpaceX and Anthropic each move a piece on Wall Street’s chessboard. Between share unlocks, a price war and promises of $70 billion in revenue, here’s what’s really moving behind the headlines.

Mistral raises €3 billion, with Nvidia and ASML on its cap table

France’s artificial intelligence champion just doubled its valuation in a year. And this time, it’s the chipmakers themselves putting money back in the pot.

The essentials:

  • On September 8, 2026, Mistral AI announced a €3 billion raise, the largest ever by a private tech company in Europe.
  • The round is led by Korean giant Samsung Electronics, alongside the Scaleup Europe fund (managed by EQT) and PSG Equity.
  • Nvidia and ASML, already shareholders, are reinvesting, alongside Andreessen Horowitz, Bpifrance, General Catalyst and funds managed by BlackRock.
  • The post-money valuation tops €21 billion, up from €11.7 billion just one year ago.

Why chip suppliers are investing in their own customer

The detail that matters is who’s signing the check. Samsung makes the memory that powers AI chips. Nvidia makes the chips themselves. ASML makes the machines that etch those chips. The three companies selling Mistral the hardware it needs to train its models are now also its shareholders.

This isn’t a first: back in September 2025, ASML led the previous round with a €1.3 billion check, valuing Mistral at €11.7 billion. A year later, the stake has nearly doubled and the round has expanded to include Samsung and Nvidia. For these manufacturers, taking a stake in one of their biggest customers locks in future demand for components, while letting them ride any valuation gains if Mistral keeps growing. For Mistral, it means easier access to hardware that is often scarce and expensive, in a race where computing power remains the main bottleneck.

The money is earmarked first and foremost for research, which the company describes as the foundation of its infrastructure, its products and its “sovereignty” — a word that comes up often in Mistral’s messaging, as the only European player ranked among the top generative AI labs alongside the American and Chinese giants.

How a European investor gets exposure, without getting exposure

Mistral is still a private company: you can’t buy Mistral shares, in a PEA or anywhere else. Two of its new shareholders, however, are publicly traded: ASML, on Euronext Amsterdam, eligible for direct holding in a PEA like any stock from a European Union country, and Nvidia, a U.S. stock available only through a regular brokerage account. For now, following the chip suppliers rather than any particular AI lab is the only way to get exposure to this funding round from a European investment account.

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Anthropic walks away from a $6 billion acquisition, a month before its IPO

One of the priciest acquisitions ever considered in AI just fell through, right as Anthropic is polishing its pitch for Wall Street.

The essentials:

  • Anthropic is dropping its plan to acquire Israeli startup Decart AI, a deal valued at around $6 billion.
  • The IPO timeline slips to mid-October 2026, at a valuation that could reach $2 trillion according to some investors.
  • The company is finalizing a revolving credit line of up to $15 billion, six times bigger than the one it secured a year ago.
  • Bankers for Anthropic and OpenAI are also pushing to land an “investment grade” credit rating as soon as they list, even though the agencies currently rate them as speculative.

A canceled deal, not just a delay

Anthropic had been in talks since August to acquire Decart AI, an Israeli startup specializing in “world models,” techniques that cut the computing cost of AI. The all-stock deal valued Decart about 50% above its previous funding round (nearly $4 billion earlier this year). After reviewing the books and the technology, Anthropic’s leadership decided not to go through with it. Neither company has said whether the price or an issue uncovered during due diligence was to blame; a more modest partnership could still happen.

The pullback coincides with a tighter timeline for the IPO itself. According to Reuters, Anthropic wouldn’t start pitching investors until mid-October, later than previously announced, with a public prospectus filing expected at the end of September. Some investors mention a target valuation of up to $2 trillion, which would make it one of the biggest IPOs ever — a figure Anthropic hasn’t publicly confirmed.

The price war worrying investors, and the race for credit

Two fronts weigh on the story Anthropic has to sell Wall Street. First, competition: since June, the Wall Street Journal has reported that OpenAI is considering steep price cuts to win back customers who moved to Anthropic, especially in developer tools, where Claude has pulled ahead. A price war would eat into the margins of both companies, already deep in the red, just as they need to convince investors they can become profitable.

Second, financing: Anthropic is finalizing a revolving credit line of up to $15 billion, six times the $2.5 billion it secured a year ago, with Morgan Stanley leading a syndicate of 17 banks. According to the Financial Times, its bankers and OpenAI’s are also pushing to land an “investment grade” credit rating once they’re public, which would open up the global bond market ($11.7 trillion) at a lower cost. The problem: both companies are still unprofitable and rated speculative by analysts. The financial backing Nvidia gives OpenAI, or that Alphabet and Broadcom give Anthropic for its chip purchases, could be scaled back if that rating comes through.

For a European investor, Anthropic — like SpaceX before it — will be a U.S. company listed on the Nasdaq, available only through a regular brokerage account, not through a PEA.

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SpaceX: a third share unlock hits today

Since its IPO in June, SpaceX has been releasing its locked-up shares in waves. The third one hits on September 9, and an even bigger deadline arrives in two weeks.

The essentials:

  • On September 9, 2026 (the 90th day of trading), 319 million additional shares become sellable by SpaceX employees and early investors.
  • The two previous unlocks (911.5 million shares on August 6, then 319 million on August 20) were absorbed without sending the stock into a lasting slide.
  • On September 21, a Nasdaq-100 rebalancing is set to boost SpaceX’s weight in the index, triggering, according to JPMorgan estimates, between $12.4 billion and $15.5 billion in automatic buying by index funds.
  • The schedule still calls for more than a billion shares to become tradable at the end of October, then roughly 1.3 billion more after third-quarter earnings in mid-November.

Why the market absorbs these waves without (too much) shaking

When a company goes public, part of its stock stays locked up for several months: that’s the “lock-up,” meant to keep a wave of selling from tanking the price in the first days of trading. SpaceX opted for a staggered release rather than unlocking everything at once: after a first wave of 911.5 million shares on August 6 and a second of 319 million on August 20, a third of the same size hits on September 9. Eventually, about 88% of SpaceX’s 13 billion shares will be tradable by 2027.

Contrary to fears of a downside shock, the stock has held up fairly well at each step: it even jumped 6% on the day of the first unlock, with short interest falling from about 34% to 11% of the float right after. There’s no guarantee this third wave will go as smoothly, but it’s close in size to the previous one, which was digested without any major incident.

The strange mechanics of index rebalancing

More surprising: it’s the stock indexes themselves that could push the price up. The Nasdaq caps the weight a recently listed company can carry in its indexes as long as its “float” (the share of stock actually available to buy) stays low. And that float has gone from under 10% at the time of the IPO to nearly 30% today, as shares unlock.

The result: at the next quarterly Nasdaq-100 rebalancing, effective before the open on September 21, SpaceX’s weight in the index should rise significantly. Index funds and ETFs that track the Nasdaq-100 will then have to automatically buy SpaceX shares to match the new weighting, whatever they think of the company — an amount JPMorgan puts between $12.4 billion and $15.5 billion depending on the version of its calculation. It’s this mechanism, more than investors’ views on the group’s rockets or data centers, that could dominate the stock’s news over the next two weeks.

For a European investor, this mechanism also runs through a tracker: the Amundi PEA Nasdaq-100 UCITS ETF, the only Nasdaq-100 tracking fund eligible for the PEA, will also automatically buy a bit more SpaceX at the time of the rebalancing — a way to get indirect exposure to the stock without opening a dedicated regular brokerage account.

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AMD promises to double its data center revenue, to $70 billion in 2027

Without waiting for its next quarterly results, AMD dropped a number that was enough to send its stock up more than 6%.

The essentials:

  • On September 8, at the Citi Global TMT conference, AMD said it is targeting around $70 billion in data center revenue in 2027, double its current run rate.
  • Of that total, AI-dedicated GPUs (the Instinct line) should account for the low end of the $40 billion range, driven by the ramp-up of the MI450 model.
  • Traditional server processors (the EPYC line) make up the rest, around $30 billion.
  • Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic are named among the customers expected to fuel this growth; AMD stock climbed more than 6% after the announcement.

Where this number comes from, and why it’s credible

This isn’t a standalone announcement: it follows logically from second-quarter 2026 results, released in early August, when AMD’s data center revenue had already jumped 107% year over year, to $6.7 billion in that quarter alone. Going from that pace to $70 billion for full-year 2027 requires a sharp acceleration, but AMD already has contracts to back it up: the deal signed in late July with Anthropic (up to 2 gigawatts of Instinct MI450 chips, worth tens of billions of dollars), the rollout of the Helios system at Microsoft Azure starting in late 2026, and previously announced commitments with Meta and OpenAI.

What’s different from previous announcements is how precise the number is and where it was given: an industry conference aimed at investors, rather than a quarterly earnings release. The market reacted immediately, with the stock gaining more than 6% right after, bringing its gain over the past six months to more than 130% according to several financial analysts.

The real test is margin, not revenue

The most discussed part of the number isn’t its total, but its breakdown: AMD now puts the AI chip share “in the low end of the $40 billion range,” with the rest (around $30 billion) coming from traditional EPYC server processors, a more mature and less flashy business. That split suggests AMD still relies as much on its legacy business as on the AI wave to hit this target.

One question remains that the market had already raised at the last quarterly results: profitability. In the second quarter of 2026, despite record revenue, AMD’s gross margin (54%) came in below analyst expectations (56%), due to capital spending nearly three times higher than forecast. Growing its data center business tenfold by 2027 without improving margins would mean selling far more chips without earning more per chip sold. The next quarterly results, expected in November, will show whether the September 8 promise also shows up in profits.

For a European investor, AMD remains a U.S. stock available through a regular brokerage account, or indirectly through a Nasdaq-100 tracker, an index it belongs to just like SpaceX.

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Edition prepared by our monitoring agent (data and sources as of Wednesday, September 9, 2026), reviewed in line with our editorial policy. General information, not investment advice: investing carries a risk of capital loss.