Reports of Samsung's potential investment in Mistral sit against a backdrop that Ashish Patel, Managing Director in Houlihan Lokey's Capital Solutions Group, says has been building for some time. European governments pushing to reduce dependency on US and Chinese technology — particularly across AI, defence, energy, and pharmaceuticals — are now visibly shaping where institutional money flows.
"Increasing pressure from European governments is driving the agenda around European sovereignty, including efforts to reduce dependency on critical technologies that have historically been supplied by the US and China. This is particularly relevant in areas such as AI, which is expected to power the 'economies of the future', alongside other strategically important sectors including defence, energy and pharmaceutical production," Patel said.
The shift extends beyond application-layer AI businesses. Patel notes growing investor appetite for the infrastructure required to support the technology: data centres, semiconductor companies, and other components of the AI stack. Companies such as Mistral and Lovable have become vocal symbols of the sovereignty movement, and Patel says capital allocation is starting to reflect that shift in market sentiment.
Valuations on the few scaled European AI assets are rising as competition for them intensifies. Secondary-market demand is building in parallel — investors and early employees seeking to crystallise positions — and each successful liquidity event reinforces the wider thesis. The self-reinforcing dynamic that once operated in Silicon Valley's favour is beginning to work at European scale.
For investment banks focused on capital solutions, the European AI sovereignty trade looks less like an emerging theme and more like a live market. Pension funds and large institutional investors allocating meaningfully into European tech remain a small proportion today, but Houlihan Lokey sees the AI sovereignty cluster as an accelerant.
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