r/MistralAI • u/Mickenfox • 1d ago
Discussion / Opinion Current state of Mistral data centers
Mistral Large 4 (le Chonk) was trained on 3,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs, and as many people have pointed out, this is not much. For example, xAI boasts about having 200,000 GPUs.
Which made me wonder: does Mistral not have more compute capacity? Since information is a bit sparse, I decided to compile a list of data centers with primary sources.
The short answer is yes: Mistral has at least >4x the capacity to used to train ML4 right now in Bruyères-le-Châtel, and they are building three more data centers. In fact in July 2026 we learned they were selling capacity to Microsoft.
So why did they not use all of it for le Chonk? We can only speculate. Maybe they decided to sell compute until they finished hiring more researchers and now they're stuck with a contract for a few more months. In any case, they have the potential to greatly improve their models over the next year.
Here's what I found, in case someone else finds it useful
Bruyères-le-Châtel
Mistral's current main data center for training, already operational. The building is owned by Éclairion, a separate company, while Mistral owns the GPUs. It has a planned capacity of 120MW (targeting Q4 2027), with a first phase of 60 MW (that's the entire data center, we don't know if Mistral is the only client)
Éclairion website: https://eclairion.com/en/sites/bruyeres-le-chatel
February 2025: Mistral CEO plans to raise more funds to back AI data center (Bloomberg interview)
Jun 2025 (GTC Paris): Nvidia reports Mistral is planning an "AI cloud" powered by 18,000 Grace Blackwell chips (they don't explicitly mention a location)
- https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/france-sovereign-ai-infrastructure/
- https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/europe-ai-infrastructure
- https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-compute/
March 2026: 830M€ raised to buy 13,800 GB300 GPUs for a data center near Paris, bringing its total capacity to 44 MW. It's ambiguous if this a "new" data center or just an expansion.
- https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/frances-mistral-raises-830-million-debt-ai-data-centre-build-up-2026-03-30/
- https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/30/mistral-ai-paris-data-center-cluster-debt-financing.html
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/30/mistral-ai-raises-830m-in-debt-to-set-up-a-data-center-near-paris/
June 2026: Nvidia announces Mistral's first deployment is already operational with 18,000 NVIDIA GB200s
Fouju (Campus AI)
A venture between Mistral, Bpifrance, MGX and Nvidia to establish "Europe's largest AI Campus" (which I assume just means more data centers), located in the Paris region and with a target capacity of 1.4 GW. Expected to be operational by 2028.
May 2025: announced
June 2026: expansion announced with imminent selection of a second site, doubling the initial investment
- https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/france-advances-europes-ai-future/
- https://www.mgx.ae/news-insights/bpifrance-mistral-and-mgx-expand-campus-ai-across-france-deliver-3-gw-network-ai
- https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/brookfield-ups-french-data-center-investment-by-10-billion/
Borlänge, Sweden
Built by EcoDataCenter with a 1.2B€ investment from Mistral, scheduled to open in 2027. The site claims "up to 600MW total available power" but the actual capacity might be smaller.
EcoDataCenter website: https://ecodatacenter.tech/data-center/ecodatacenter2
February 2026: announced
- https://ecodatacenter.tech/press/mistral-ai-and-ecodatacenter-partner-to-build-ai-focused-data-center-in-sweden-3431886
- https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/11/mistral-ai-infrastructure-sweden.html
Les Ulis
10MW data center for inference, scheduled to open in Q3 2026.
May 2026: Announced
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u/SpiritedInflation835 1d ago
L'an prochain, nous verrons l'arrivée du HYPERCHONKADONK
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u/Helpful_Jelly5486 21h ago edited 21h ago
Chungus is the next level but I think I’m wrong based on this chart. Then there’s Heckin Chonker and so on. Until the boss “oh lawd he comin”. I’m eager to see if there’s going to be a flash model called fine boi?
https://i.etsystatic.com/30954655/r/il/1b0fa5/4746858297/il_1588xN.4746858297_ri0e.jpg
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u/Plenty_Price2475 1d ago
I keep seeing people compare Mistral's training runs to xAI like it's a fair fight. xAI has basically unlimited money from Musk's other companies and they're building a 200k GPU cluster in Memphis that probably costs more than Mistral's entire valuation. Meanwhile Mistral is actually profitable (or close to it) and not burning cash like crazy.
The Microsoft deal makes a lot of sense actually. They probably signed that contract before they had enough researchers to fully use the compute and now they're stuck selling it. Better than letting expensive GPUs sit idle I guess. Plus Microsoft gets access to European data centers which helps with GDPR compliance.
The Fouju campus targeting 1.4 GW is pretty ambitious though. That's like 5-10x what they have now. If they actually get that running by 2028 they could be training models much closer to what the big labs are doing. Question is whether they can hire enough people fast enough to make use of it all.
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u/Interesting_Tax7354 23h ago
Do you have any idea of their financials? Or you’re just speaking out of nowhere? Do you know how much revenues they are making this year?
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u/DanzakFromEurope 15h ago
It would be pretty awesome if Mistral was profitable with all the expansion they are doing. But they are probably far from it because of it. Although their revenue is growing rapidly.
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u/ColdJunction 1d ago
There is a problem when comparing computer power of companies with a business model based of closed models vs the one based on open weight models.
By definition, if it's closed, you are doing training+inference in-house, so you need more computing power for the same end-customers load. You are an infrastructure company. If your business model like Mistral is to sell service hours to integrate in-house model inference on-premise (this means on the hardware the customer own and control), you are more a consulting company which turn out to acquire its expertise by training and doing inference for smaller customers.
So if you want to compare the whole technical solution, you have to compare Mistral infra + its big customers infra vs closed-model AI firms infra. And these big accounts are probably not very vocal about their infra (for all sort of reasons) where big AI companies are very vocal about there computing power, regardless if it's operational or not (to keep investors investing).
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u/SkyPL 14h ago edited 13h ago
Les Ulis
scheduled to open in Q3 2026.
It's Q4 already. 👀 So... did it open?
The Mistral Large 4 after some web search tells me that "As of October 2026, there has been no official public announcement or confirmation that the Les Ulis data center has officially opened" which makes me question whether they already missed the mark with that one. 🤔
Across all these datacenters we have... 120 + 600 + 10 = 0.73 GW of dedicated* compute by end of 2027 and further 1.4 GW of shared by end of 2028. For extra context - America's largest currently operational datacenter (the one that Musk owns) is about 0.9 GW. Given the size discrepancy I think it's pretty good 👍
* well, "dedicated", with heavy quotation marks, as Mistral sells a lot of its compute to Microsoft, allowing Microsoft to compete for some of the same procurements that Mistral does (as now Microsoft can claim that they sell services from EU-owned servers...).
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u/InterestingSafety612 12h ago
This datacenter is already opened, it's called Digital Realty.
Mistral rents a chunk of the servers for inference, not model traning.
Here is a french article about it:
https://dcmag.fr/linference-de-mistral-ai-passe-a-lechelle-dans-les-hubs-de-colocation-de-digital-realty-entretien-avec-fabrice-coquio/2
u/SkyPL 12h ago
Awesome!
It indicates that it can go up to 100 kW bays, or even beyond, and emphasizes that the real stake is not limited to electrical power, it is mainly about the implementation of a reliable DLC, combined with air cooling devices for the part of the equipment that cannot operate in liquid.
Wow, I did not expect that! Great to read that they have so much room for expansion!
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u/Mickenfox 11h ago
Sadly while companies like to announce that they started building a data center, they rarely give any updates beyond that, and their target dates and capacities aren't always reliable either, so there's really not much else we can find out.
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u/Negative-Web8619 19h ago
You're asking why they're not using all their compute capacity for training...?
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u/AppealSame4367 16h ago
- Mistral is a business and has to make money in order to use GPUs for training instead of getting paid for them.
- It's not as easy in Europe to get many subsidies. It's kind of a "proof yourself" mentality. Are you worth it, like really really worth it?
- You cannot reroute inference that is in use to do whatever in Europe. Contracts mean something, you can't just water down your subscriptions.
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u/TheNeronimo 1d ago
They're probably selling capacity to Microsoft because it promises more revenue than using that compute for Mistral services
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u/schubidubiduba 1d ago
Mistral's biggest selling point is "We help your company/institution finetune a model on your data, just for you to use" so that's probably what they are doing with the GPUs