France’s Mistral AI is reportedly in talks to secure equity and debt financing.

According to Bloomberg, Mistral may raise as much as $1bn in equity from MGX, an UAE’s investment firm focused on AI investments.

The AI startup may also secure hundreds of millions of euros in debt from Bpifrance, a French state-owned investment bank, and other unnamed French lenders.

People close to the deal told Bloomberg that the funds would be used for ‘Mistral Compute,’ an AI cloud service run on 18,000 of Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell chips.

Mistral, MGX, and Bpifrance have an established relationship. In May, the three companies announced the formation of a joint venture with Nvidia to establish a 1.4GW campus outside of Paris.

Founded in 2023, Mistral, which was valued at $6.2bn (€5.8bn) during its last funding round, is a French AI startup specializing in open-source large language models (LLMs). Its flagship LLM, Le Chat, is regarded as Europe’s most competitive AI offering when stacked up against alternatives in America and China.

MGX is best known for its investment in Stargate. It is chaired by Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan – the brother of the UAE’s president – who is also the chair and controlling shareholder of G42, a UAE-based AI company.

DCD spoke to Mistral in the latest issue of DCD>Magazine. Download and read for free today.