French artificial intelligence lab Mistral AI has raised $830 million in debt financing to fund the purchase of GPUs for its planned data center outside Paris.

The cash will be used to finance Nvidia Grace Blackwell infrastructure, and give Mistral, which makes ChatGPT competitor Le Chat, access to 13,800 Nvidia GB300 GPUs and 44MW of powered capacity.

It will install the hardware at a data center in Bruyères-le-Châtel, south of Paris, which is owned and run by French data center firm Eclairion, and intends to start operations at the site by the end of June.

In a statement posted on LinkedIn, Mistral said the financing “underscores confidence in our vision: Europe needs an ambitious AI cloud infrastructure and an independent AI stack.”

The company added: “Our objective is to secure 200MW of capacity across Europe by the end of 2027 to support the demand from governments and enterprises that seek to build and control their own AI.”

Mistral has raised the cash from a consortium of lenders comprising Bpifrance, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, HSBC, La Banque Postale, MUFG, and Natixis Corporate & Investment Banking. It follows an equity funding round last year, led by ASML, which raised €1.7 billion ($1.99bn) and valued Mistral at €11.7 billion ($13.67bn).

The company, seen by many in Europe as the best sovereign alternative to US AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic, announced a deal with Eclairion to lease data center space in February last year. DCD visited the site in April as part of an in-depth feature on the French AI data center market.

At the time, Mistral said it would be procuring 18,000 Nvidia GB200 GPUs from French AI cloud provider Scaleway, with a view to opening the data center in the summer of 2025 at a capacity of 40MW. It would seem the project has been delayed, and the company has now opted for the newer generation of Nvidia hardware instead.

Whether the deal with Scaleway remains in place has not been disclosed. DCD has contacted Mistral for comment.

Elsewhere in Europe, Mistral has signed a deal with EcoDataCenter to install AI infrastructure at the colo firm’s data centers in Sweden.