French AI start-up Mistral has raised $830 million (£630m), its first debt financing, to build a planned 44-megawatt data centre outside Paris.
The financing is to be used to buy up to 13,800 chips from Nvidia for the facility in Bruyères-le-Châtel, said Mistral, which has been sealing contracts with European enterprises and governments amid concerns in Europe about relying too heavily on US technology.
The seven lenders include five French banks, including BNP Paribas, which recently expanded an existing contract with Mistral.
New data centre
The French data centre is planned to become operational in the second quarter of this year, Mistral said.
The company is planning to have 200 MW of capacity in sites across Europe by the end of next year, including the French site and a data centre in Sweden, both of which were announced in February.
The capacity plans are relatively small compared with those of American companies, which are spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on sprawling AI facilities.
Facebook parent Meta, for instance, said last week it would spend $10bn on a Texas site, where it intends to have 1 GW of capacity online in 2028.
Debt-fuelled expansion
American tech companies and AI-focused “neocloud” providers have also increasingly tapped debt markets to fund their AI infrastructure plans.
Mistral, founded by veterans of Google’s DeepMind and Facebook parent Meta, was last valued at €12bn (£10.4bn) in a €2bn funding round in September.
The company said its debt financing was supported by Bpifrance, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, HSBC, La Banque Postale, MUFG and Natixis CIB.
