ASML's Mistral investment could augur more European tech collaborations, Le Maire says

By Michel Rose and Florence Loeve

PARIS (Reuters) -Dutch chip-equipment maker ASML's 1.3 billion euro ($1.5 billion) investment in French startup Mistral AI could be the start of more consolidation in the fragmented European tech ecosystem, former French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said.

Le Maire, who left French politics in July last year after President Emmanuel Macron's shock decision to call snap elections, is now a strategic adviser to ASML, which this month became Mistral's top shareholder.

"Our ambition is to unite players from this ecosystem to ensure the power of European technology can rival that of Chinese and American technology," Le Maire told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.

Le Maire said Europe had "all the industries and the know-how" to become an AI power in the next decades if it overcomes fragmentation.

Asked about the valuation gap between Mistral and American AI giants such as OpenAI, now valued at hundreds of billions of dollars, Le Maire said the EU's biggest economies, Germany, France and Italy, needed to move ahead with a capital markets union to create a bigger pool of funds for investment, without waiting for all 27 member states to agree.

But he also said he thought a tech bubble had formed in the U.S., which was likely to burst "in the coming months".

"There's a bubble, tech players are over-valued in the United States, and that could trigger an economic recession tomorrow," he said.

Le Maire said the European Commission was too passive in the face of aggressive Chinese and American competition.

"What the technocrats don't understand is that we need massive, fast and efficient decisions to protect our industry," he said.

The EU is now lagging behind China in areas such as car batteries and it needs to set conditions such as technology transfers on Chinese companies in return for access to the European market, he added.

"For a long time, we were imitated powers. We are going to have to become an imitating power," he said.

($1 = 0.8512 euros)

(Reporting by Michel Rose and Florence LoeveEditing by Gareth Jones)