Mistral raises 830 million euros to finance a major project in France.

Mistral, the French startup that wants to establish itself as a top player in the field of artificial intelligence, has just announced a new fundraising round. A few months after its last fundraising round, the company raised 830 million euros through a funding round involving actors such as Bpifrance, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, HSBC, La Banque Postale, MUFG and Natixis CIB.

Also read: We tested Le Chat de Mistral for one week – can French AI forget ChatGPT?

The first data center of Mistral in France

The money injected by investors will be used to finance Mistral's first data center in Bruyères-le-Châtel, in Essonne. Announced in February 2025, the center will run 13,800 Nvidia chips with a power capacity of 44 MW. Operations are expected to start before the end of summer 2026. Mistral aims to reach 200 MW by the end of 2027. Note that Mistral also plans to build a data center in Sweden.

This data center will help the startup provide the computing power needed for its AI models. It will also and above all support the service Mistral Compute, the new AI infrastructure offering from Mistral AI, which should allow it to break free from American giants such as Amazon, Google or Microsoft. As questions of digital sovereignty multiply with the rise of AI, Compute is becoming one of the cornerstones of Mistral's strategy.

« The development of our infrastructure in Europe is essential to strengthen our clients' capabilities and ensure that innovation and autonomy in AI remain at the heart of Europe. We will continue to invest in this area, given the strong and sustained demand from governments, companies, and research institutions seeking to build their own customized AI environments rather than relying on third-party cloud providers. », declares Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral AI, in a press release.

This is the first time Mistral AI is financing itself through debt. This choice illustrates the growing confidence of investors in European AI actors. The fundraising comes as Fluidstack, a British company specialized in providing computing power for AI, has withdrawn from Mistral's data center project. In the wake of this, Fluidstack has abruptly withdrawn from other projects in France.

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