French AI startup Mistral has reportedly secured $830 million in debt financing. The funds will be used to build a data center powered by Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) chips.
The financing round was backed by a consortium of seven global banks, including BPIFrance, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, HSBC, La Banque Postale, MUFG, and Natixis CIB, reported Reuters.
Mistral’s new data center near Paris will support both AI model training and inference services, with operations expected to begin in Q2 this year.
The facility will run on 13,800 Nvidia GB300 GPUs, giving it a total capacity of 44 MW. Mistral plans to scale up to 200 MW of capacity across Europe by the end of 2027.
CEO Arthur Mensch told the publication that expanding infrastructure in Europe is essential to support customers while keeping AI innovation and autonomy rooted in the region.
Mistral AI did not immediately respond to Benzinga’s request for comments.
Europe AI push
This move by Mistral is part of a broader strategy to strengthen Europe’s AI capabilities. In February, Mistral announced a $1.4 billion investment with Swedish company EcoDataCenter to build an AI-centric data center in Sweden. This was Mistral’s first AI infrastructure investment outside of France.
In December, Mistral launched a suite of AI models, positioning itself as a rival to U.S. AI giants like OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.‘s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) Google. The Mistral 3 release included a large frontier model with multimodal and multilingual capabilities and nine smaller offline-capable, fully customizable models.
However, Mistral AI’s $2.9 billion funding push pales in comparison to U.S. rivals, with OpenAI at $180 billion and Anthropic at $59 billion, reported CNBC, citing deal-counting platform Dealroom.
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by a Benzinga editor.
Photo courtesy: Robert Way from Shutterstock
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