Mistral AI has raised $830 million in debt, its first debt financing since the company was founded in April 2023, to fund the purchase of 13,800 Nvidia chips for a major data centre near Paris, Reuters reports.

The facility, located at Bruyères-le-Châtel south of Paris, is expected to come online in the second quarter of 2026. The financing was arranged through a consortium of seven banks, including BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, HSBC, and MUFG.

The move marks a strategic shift for Mistral. The company has until now relied on cloud providers, including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and CoreWeave, to run its models and provide GPU access to customers. 

Building and owning data centre infrastructure is a more capital-intensive model but gives Mistral direct control over its compute stack, an increasingly important consideration for European enterprise and government customers who want AI services that do not route through American hyperscaler infrastructure.

Mistral's ARR crossed $400 million in February 2026, up from $20 million a year earlier, and the company has set a target of $1 billion in recurring annual revenue by end of year.

The $830 million debt facility sits within a broader infrastructure ambition that Mistral has been building since late 2025. In March 2026, MGX, Abu Dhabi's $100 billion AI investment fund, Bpifrance, Nvidia, and Mistral jointly announced plans for a 1.4 gigawatt AI campus near Paris, with construction expected to begin in the second half of 2026 and operations launching by 2028.

That project is on a different scale from the Bruyères-le-Châtel facility; the debt raise announced today funds the nearer-term, smaller deployment. In February 2026, Mistral also acquired Koyeb, a Paris-based cloud infrastructure startup, as part of the same infrastructure buildout strategy.

Mistral was founded in April 2023 by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix, Mensch from Google DeepMind, Lample and Lacroix from Meta. It raised a $2 billion Series C in September 2025, valuing the company at approximately $13.8 billion, making it Europe's highest-valued AI startup.

Total equity raised across all rounds now exceeds $3 billion. The company employs around 860 people. It has positioned itself as the principal European alternative to US frontier AI providers, a pitch that has become commercially significant as European enterprises and governments grow increasingly cautious about technology dependency on US companies amid geopolitical volatility.