French AI start-up Mistral raises $830m in debt

The Paris-based company is building out ‘cutting-edge’ European data centres with a total capacity ambition of 200MW by 2027.

French AI start-up Mistral has raised $830m in its first debt financing, for the purposes of funding its data centre near Paris.

The company said the deal, supported by a consortium of seven “top-tier” global banks, would pay for Nvidia Grace Blackwell infrastructure with 13,800 Nvidia GB300 GPUs at the “cutting-edge” centre, bringing powered capacity to 44MW.

The data centre at Bruyères-le-Châtel, scheduled to be operational in the first half of this year, was previously earmarked to train AI models belonging to Mistral and its customers, while also “delivering high-performance inference services”, according to the company.

Last month, Mistral said it would spend over $1.4bn in Sweden on digital infrastructure, including a data centre, building towards its stated goal of 200MW of capacity across Europe by 2027.

“Scaling our infrastructure in Europe is critical to empower our customers and to ensure AI innovation and autonomy remain at the heart of Europe,” said Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral AI.

“We will continue to invest in this area, given the surging and sustained demand from governments, enterprises and research institutions seeking to build their own customised AI environment, rather than depend on third-party cloud providers.”

Mistral said it is building a “vertically integrated AI company” comprising “frontier open-weight models, deep enterprise integration, production deployments and its own compute infrastructure”.

It counts organisations in the tech, retail, logistics and public sectors among its customers, and has already partnered with the likes of AMSL, Ericsson and the European Space Agency to train models on their proprietary data.

Earlier this month, Mistral launched both ‘Small 4’, the newest model in its fully open-source ‘Small’ series with an aim of consolidating capabilities of its flagship models, and ‘Forge’, a platform that lets enterprises build custom models trained on their own data.

Last September, the 2023-founded French AI darling announced a Series C raise of around $2bn at a post-money valuation of more than $13bn, led by Dutch chipmaker ASML. Existing investors DST Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Bpifrance, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Lightspeed and Nvidia took part.

Although a frontrunner in the European AI space, Mistral is far behind US competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic in terms of funding levels and valuations.

Mistral is a founding member of the Nvidia Nemotron Coalition. As part of the initiative, Mistral and Nvidia plan to co-develop frontier open-source AI models.

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