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French artificial intelligence (AI) company Mistral has raised $830 million (€750 million) to build a new data centre near Paris.
The data centre, near Bruyères-le-Châtel, a commune south of Paris, is being built to run on over 13,000 NVIDIA chips. The chips will be used to train Mistral’s AI model and bring its compute power up to 44 megawatts (MW).
That is roughly one and a half times more power than a conventional data centre, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The company borrowed the money from seven banks for the data centre, which it said “underscores their confidence in our vision: Europe needs an ambitious AI cloud infrastructure”.
Mistral is looking to build 200 megawatts of compute capacity across Europe by next year, which is the equivalent of two hyperscale data centres which have the most compute power.
Last month, the company announced a $1.4 billion (€1.2 billion) investment in Sweden to build out AI infrastructure, including a data centre which will deliver “advanced compute capacity,” to meet the demands of the next generation of AI.
It also plans to build “the biggest artificial intelligence campus in Europe” with up to 1.4 gigawatts (GW) of power in France before 2030 with NVIDIA and MGX, an investment fund from the United Arab Emirates, French media reported.