Mistral finances 13,800 GB300 GPUs and 44 MW for its own data centre south of Paris

Mistral Compute was unveiled at VivaTech in June 2025 as a sovereign European AI cloud: 18,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs in an initial 40 MW data centre in Essonne, procured through Scaleway and expandable toward 100 MW. The site slipped, and in March 2026 Mistral closed $830 million of debt financing that gives it 13,800 of the newer GB300 GPUs and 44 MW of powered capacity at Eclairion's facility in Bruyères-le-Châtel.

On the French grid — roughly 90% nuclear, hydro and renewables — the cluster's electricity is among the lowest-carbon in the index. The hardware is another matter: at ecogpt.co's factor of 514 kg CO₂e embodied per accelerator slot, the 13,800 GPUs carry about 7,000 tonnes of manufacturing emissions before the first token, and 44 MW implies roughly 1,200 tonnes of copper in the build.

Mistral remains the only frontier lab to have published a peer-reviewed life-cycle assessment, including a mineral-depletion figure (660 kg Sb-eq for Mistral Large 2).