Mistral says it raised $830 million in debt for an AI data center to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic

Mistral, a French AI company, announced Monday the completion of its first-ever debt raise — $830 million — to fund a new data center near Paris.

The new site in Bruyères-le-Châtel will use 13,800 Nvidia $NVDA GB300 GPUs as part of Mistral's Grace Blackwell infrastructure, providing a total capacity of 44 megawatts. Mistral chose Bruyères-le-Châtel for the project in February 2025, and the facility is expected to open in the second quarter of 2026, according to Reuters.

Seven banks backed the transaction: Bpifrance, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, HSBC, La Banque Postale, MUFG, and Natixis Corporate & Investment Banking, the company 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," CEO Arthur Mensch said in a statement. "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 customized AI environment, rather than depend on third-party cloud providers."

The site will support model training and inference workloads once it comes online, according to CNBC. Earlier this year, the company announced a separate 1.2-billion-euro plan for a second data center in Sweden. Across Europe, Mistral is pursuing a total of 200 megawatts in capacity, a goal it has set for the end of 2027.

The startup was established in 2023 and ranks among a small group of European firms working on foundational AI models; its clients include the French military, according to Reuters. At $2.9 billion in total funding, Mistral leads European LLM developers in capital raised, according to CNBC — though it remains well behind U.S. rivals OpenAI ($180 billion) and Anthropic ($59 billion).