Mistral AI, a French generative artificial intelligence (AI) company, has reportedly raised US$ 830 million to buy 13,800 NVIDIA chips for a major data center near Paris. The data center in Bruyeres-le-Chatel is expected to become operational in the second quarter of 2026.
According to a report by Reuters, a consortium of seven banks enabled Mistral’s debt raising. These include BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole CIB, HSBC and MUFG. The formal announcement is expected to be made soon.
“Scaling our infrastructure in Europe is critical to empower our customers and to ensure AI innovation and autonomy remain at the heart of Europe,” Chief Executive Arthur Mensch said in a statement shared with Reuters.
Mistral reportedly aims to position itself as an alternative to American AI giants such as OpenAI, Anthropic etc. even as Europe moves towards realizing its AI ambitions. According to a report by CNBC, the data center site, near Paris, was selected by Mistral in 2025. It will power the training of the company’s AI models and deliver inference services. It’s set to become operational in the second quarter of this year. Mistral aims to have 200 MW of capacity across Europe by the end of 2027.
Readers would recall that in February 2026, Mistral and EcoDataCenter, a sustainable data center operator and high-performance computing (HPC) service provider, have announced a €1.2 billion (US$ 1.4 billion) partnership to build an AI-focused data center at EcoDataCenter’s Borlänge site in Sweden. The project, set to open in 2027, marks Mistral AI’s first AI infrastructure investment outside France, and aims to strengthen Europe’s technological autonomy in artificial intelligence.
