Mistral AI has secured $830 million in its first debt financing to fund a new data center outside Paris, adding to a wave of borrowing tied to the rapid buildout of AI infrastructure.
The French startup said Monday the financing will support operations at its facility in Bruyères-le-Châtel, where it plans to deploy 13,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GB300 GPUs. The site will have 44 megawatts of power capacity once completed.
A consortium of lenders, including BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, HSBC, and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group participated in the deal, alongside French public investment bank Bpifrance and other lenders.
The financing marks Mistral’s first use of debt markets as it scales infrastructure to support its AI models, underscoring how capital-intensive the race to build sovereign AI capacity in Europe has become. The company said it aims to develop 200 MW of capacity across the continent by 2027 to serve governments and enterprises seeking more control over data and compute.
The deal comes as AI developers and data center operators increasingly tap debt markets to fund multi-gigawatt campuses and high-performance computing clusters, shifting away from pure equity funding as capital needs balloon.
In the U.S., companies tied to the AI infrastructure buildout have collectively raised tens of billions of dollars through loans and bond issuances over the past year. Operators such as Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ) and Cipher Digital have secured large revolving credit facilities and issued high-yield debt to fund AI-focused data center expansions, while cloud infrastructure firm CoreWeave has pursued multi-billion-dollar term loans backed by long-term contracts with hyperscale customers.
The growing reliance on debt reflects both the scale of required investment—often measured in gigawatts of power capacity—and lenders’ increasing comfort with AI infrastructure as an asset class, particularly when projects are supported by long-term contracts or strong counterparties.