Mistral secures $830 million in debt financing to fund AI data center French AI startup Mistral has secured $830 million in debt financing to fund the construction and operation of a data center near Paris. The funds will be used to power the facility, which will house thousands of Nvidia GB300 graphics processing units (GPUs) and support the training of Mistral’s AI models as well as provide inference services. The data center, selected in 2025, is expected to become operational in the second quarter of this year. Mistral, founded in 2023, is one of the few European startups developing foundational AI models, aiming to compete with U.S.-based giants like OpenAI and Anthropic. Despite its ambitions, the company has historically operated with a smaller financial footprint compared to its American counterparts. However, its recent fundraising efforts have positioned it as the most well-funded large language model (LLM) builder in Europe, having raised $2.9 billion in total, according to Dealroom. The $830 million debt financing was supported by a consortium of seven global banks, including Bpifrance, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, HSBC, La Banque Postale, MUFG, and Natixis CIB. This transaction underscores the growing interest in European AI infrastructure, as Mistral continues to expand its compute capacity. The data center near Paris will initially feature 13,800 Nvidia GPUs, providing a total capacity of 44 megawatts (MW). Mistral aims to increase its European capacity to 200 MW by the end of 2027. The company has increasingly prioritized infrastructure investment, with a notable example being its 1.2-billion-euro plan announced in February 2026 to build data centers and compute facilities in Sweden.#hsbc #mistral #bnpparibas #crdit_agricole_cib #la_banque_postale
