As Paris gets ready to kick off the AI Action Summit today, French AI darling Mistral has announced it is investing ‘several billions of euros’ to build its own data centre in France.
The startup, which develops generative AI models and is seen as Europe’s best chance to compete against US players like OpenAI, said in a LinkedIn post that the move “marks another big step in strengthening our independence.”
Mistral currently trains and runs its models using infrastructure owned by US tech giants such as AWS and Microsoft.
The startup will therefore be able to build its technology using its own infrastructure. Speaking to French TV channel TF1, Mistral cofounder and CEO Arthur Mensch said: “It’s a choice we are making to have control over the whole value chain, from the machine to the software.”
Mensch added that this will also enable Mistral to have access to “the best infrastructure” (such as high-performance chips) to better models as efficiently as possible.
In an interview with French publication Le Parisien, Mensch said that the investment will represent several billions of euros. The data centre will be located in Essonne in the south of Paris, and will be up and running in the next few months.
Building French data centres
It is the latest of a series of announcements ahead of the AI Action Summit, which have seen various players committing billions of euros to building data centres in France.
Last week, French president Emmanuel Macron announced that the UAE will invest billions of euros to build a massive AI data centre in France, which represents an estimated €30bn-50bn. Swedish startup evroc has just unveiled plans to build a hyperscale data centre in France.
And Canadian fund Brookfield Asset Management has also been reported to be planning a €20bn investment to develop data centres and AI infrastructure in France over the next five years.
France is hoping to position itself as a prime location to build data centres for AI in part due to the country’s low-carbon energy mix, which is due to its heavy reliance on nuclear power.
Mistral says that its new data centre will be fully powered by decarbonised energy.
“We chose France because of its energy efficiency, the quality of its energy mix when it comes to carbon emissions,” Mensch told TF1.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/mistral-data-center-news/
