French AI startup Mistral announced Monday that it has secured $830 million in debt to fund thousands of power-powered data centers. Nvidia Chips.
Founded in 2023, Mistral is one of the few European startups building basic AI models and is looking to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, albeit with a much smaller war chest.
The company has increasingly focused on investing in the infrastructure needed to power its AI, announcing in February a €1.2 billion plan to build data centers and computing capacity in Sweden.
“Expanding our infrastructure in Europe is critical to empowering our customers and ensuring that AI innovation and autonomy remain at the heart of Europe,” Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said in a statement.
“We continue to invest in this space given the rapidly increasing and continuing demand from governments, enterprises, and research institutions looking to build their own customized AI environments rather than relying on third-party cloud providers.”
The transaction was supported by a consortium of seven global banks including Bpifrance, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, HSBC, La Banque Postale, MUFG and Natixis CIB.
The data center site near Paris will be selected by Mistral in 2025 to power the training of the company’s AI models and provide inference services. It is expected to be operational in the second quarter of this year.
The data center will be equipped with 13,800 Nvidia GB300 graphics processing units (GPUs) for a total capacity of 44 MW. Mistral aims to have a power generation capacity of 200MW across Europe by the end of 2027.
The French startup is Europe’s most-funded large-scale language model (LLM) builder, raising $2.9 billion, according to deal aggregation platform Dealroom, but that number dwarfs the amount raised by its U.S. peers.
According to Dealroom, OpenAI has raised $180 billion of Anthropic’s total funding of $59 billion.
However, European AI startups are increasingly raising large amounts of capital from investors. So far in 2026, UK-based duo AI data center company Nscale and self-driving startup Wayve have raised $2 billion and $1.2 billion, respectively, while France’s AMI Labs has also raised $1 billion.
