Mistral is pitching itself as an open-source, sovereign data alternative to US proprietary AI models.
Mistral today said it had secured $830m in debt financing, marking its first debt raise, to buy Nvidia chips to power its first data centre.
The French AI startup, which is seen as a European rival to larger US LLM companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, said the deal represents a “significant milestone”.
The debt raising was financed by a consortium of seven banks: Bpifrance, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, HSBC, La Banque Postale, MUFG and Natixis CIB. Mistral said the funding will finance 13,800 Nvidia GPUs as it builds out its first data centre in its native France.
The raising of debt comes as Mistral, which is valued €11.7bn, looks to take on US and China in the AI race.
Mistral, which is looking to become a full stack AI player, is pitching itself as an open-source, sovereign data alternative to the largely proprietary models of its US rivals.
Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral, said: “Scaling our infrastructure in Europe is critical to empower our customers and to ensure AI innovation and autonomy remain at the heart of Europe.
“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.”
Earlier this year, Mistral announced details of its first-ever data centre near Paris, France, which will power the training of Mistral AI’s own models, as well as those of its customers. It is set to become operational in Q2 2026.
Last month, it also announced the launch of a new data centre in Sweden.