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Five of Europe's biggest companies just bought compute Mistral has not built. ASML, Amadeus, Capgemini, Caisse des Dépôts and CMA CGM have signed multi-year commitments to buy capacity from Mistral. The Mistral data centre buildout targets up to 1GW across Europe by 2030, and almost none of it exists yet. August 14, 2026 - 2:35 pm Mistral set out the plan on 11 August. Its own announcement covers three things at once. Regional endpoints are now generally available, letting customers pick Europe or the US for inference. A Priority Tier in public preview adds custom rate limits and an uptime commitment. The third part is the one that funds the other two. What a European Compute Unit is. The instrument is a forward sale. Enterprises commit money now, and it converts into multi-year access to compute Mistral will build later. Mistral calls these European Compute Units. Customers can spend them across its compute products once capacity comes online. The terms are long. Partners commit for around five years with no early exit, chief technology officer Timothée Lacroix told European Business Magazine. That is the trade. Mistral gets a demand signal it can finance against, and the buyer accepts delivery risk on infrastructure that is mostly still drawings. Who signed. Five companies form what Mistral calls the anchor group, Sifted reported. ASML in the Netherlands, Amadeus in Spain, Capgemini and Caisse des Dépôts in France, and the shipping group CMA CGM. Each is represented by its chief executive in the announcement. Christophe Fouquet for ASML, Luis Maroto for Amadeus, Aiman Ezzat for Capgemini, Olivier Sichel for Caisse des Dépôts and Rodolphe Saadé for CMA CGM. Fouquet framed it as backing scale. Mistral "is taking on that challenge with the scale, ambition, and staying power", he said. Caisse des Dépôts is worth naming twice. It is a French state financial institution, so one of the five anchor customers is the state itself. ASML is on both sides of the table. The Dutch company is not only a customer. ASML led Mistral's €1.7bn round in September 2025, which valued the company at €11.7bn. Now it has committed to buy the compute that round helps build. Both facts come from the companies themselves, and neither is hidden. It does change how to read the demand signal. An anchor order from an investor tells you less about the open market than an order from a stranger. Microsoft made a separate commitment three weeks earlier. That deal funds Nvidia Vera Rubin chips for Mistral's European capacity and deliberately avoids an equity stake. The buildout behind the promise. The target is up to 1GW by 2030, with about 200MW by the end of 2027. Arthur Mensch has previously put a gigawatt of compute at roughly $50bn of investment. The first facility is smaller than the headline. It runs to 44MW, sits south of Paris, and carries an $830m loan. The gap between 44MW and 1,000MW is the project. Everything the anchor group has bought sits on the far side of it. Mistral has other iron in the ground already, per DatacenterDynamics. A 40MW GPU cluster in the Paris region runs at an Eclairion facility hosted by Scaleway. A larger campus is a joint venture. Mistral, Bpifrance, the UAE fund MGX and Nvidia have discussed a 1.4GW site in the same region, with a possible 2028 start. The first outside model it will run is Chinese. Mistral will host third-party open models on the same infrastructure, under the same regional controls. The first is GLM-5.2, from the Beijing lab Z.ai, also known as Zhipu. The model has a one-million-token context window and costs $1.40 per million input tokens. Z.ai released GLM-5.2 as open weights with no usage restrictions. Mistral's pitch is that the infrastructure layer matters more than any single model, as The New Stack put it. Customers get one place to run open models without starting over each time they switch. Matan Grinberg, chief executive of Factory, supplied the customer line. Mistral "allows us to run open models under strict regional controls and service commitments", he said. Sovereignty here means jurisdiction over where the weights run, not where they came from. Those are different claims, and the announcement makes the first one. The argument this walks into. Europe has been having a version of this debate for two years. Mistral itself spent them warning that American providers could switch European customers off, a case the desk covered as its sovereignty moment. The counterargument is about the layer below. Renting GPU capacity reinforces the illusion of sovereignty while the chips stay American, one contributor argued here in May. Owning the buildings answers part of that and not all of it. Mistral will run Nvidia silicon in European halls under European law. The physical constraints are real too. Research this summer put power availability, planning delays, build costs and skills shortages in the way of Europe's data centre plans. Those constraints apply to Mistral exactly as they apply to everyone else. A gigawatt by 2030 needs grid connections that are already scarce. The company is also raising again. Reports put it in talks for about €3bn at a valuation near €20bn. That round and this coalition do the same job from different directions. One brings equity, the other brings contracted demand, and both are needed before a spade goes in the ground. What would settle it. Three things, and the first is disclosure. Mistral has not published the capacity, pricing or delivery dates attached to any European Compute Unit. Without those, the size of the commitments cannot be read. Five chief executives on a page is a strong signal and not a number. The second is the 2027 milestone. About 200MW by the end of next year is checkable, and it is the first point at which the forward sale either has product behind it or does not. The third is who signs next. Five anchor customers, one of them a lead investor and one of them the French state, is a start rather than a market. Mistral has sold the idea of European compute before it has the compute. The interesting part is that five of Europe's largest companies were willing to pay for it anyway.

Mistral has secured commitments from enterprise customers including ASML and Amadeus to support its data centre expansion. The French AI company is positioning itself as a European neocloud provider. The backing comes as Mistral pursues an ambitious buildout of its infrastructure. The company is increasingly focusing on cloud services to compete in the European market.

OpenAI steps up Singapore footprint, in talks to lease 100,000 sq ft in Shaw Tower. Rival Anthropic has leased about 100 desks within The Executive Centre facility at Ocean Financial Centre Published Fri, Aug 14, 2026 · 04:41 PM * OpenAI is negotiating to lease five office floors in Shaw Tower in Beach Road. PHOTO: BT FILE [SINGAPORE] Amid the current wave of artificial intelligence companies on an expansion trail into Singapore, ChatGPT creator OpenAI is said to be in talks to lease about 100,000 square feet of offices at the new Shaw Tower in Beach Road. The space that OpenAI is negotiating to lease spans five floors. The 32-storey Shaw Tower, with 435,000 sq ft of office space, received its Temporary Occupation Permit in mid-June. If a lease is concluded, this will mark a big step-up in the San Francisco-based technology company's real estate footprint in Singapore. OpenAI currently operates out of flexible space operator The Work Project's facility in CapitaSpring, where it is understood to be leasing about 100 desks. OpenAI has big plans in the city state. In May, the group announced that it will open its first Applied AI Lab outside the US in Singapore and hire more than 200 specialised artificial intelligence professionals over the next few years as part of a S$300 million investment in the Republic. OpenAI inked a memorandum of understanding with Singapore's Ministry of Digital Development and Information which aims to advance applied AI innovation, build AI talent and make AI more accessible to citizens, enterprises and the public sector. Asean intelligence. Get insights into businesses across South-east Asia The bulk of the more than 200 planned hires are expected to be forward deployed engineers and other technical specialists. Forward deployed engineers work directly with customers and organisations to customise and implement AI systems for specific business or operational needs. Meanwhile, OpenAI's biggest rival Anthropic has also set up shop in Singapore, leasing about 100 desks within The Executive Centre facility at Ocean Financial Centre in Collyer Quay. Earlier in June this year, Anthropic signalled its intention to expand its Singapore operations as it advertised multiple job openings through its website. Mistral, Sierra taking own offices. Several other AI firms are also sinking roots in Singapore. French generative AI unicorn Mistral AI told The Business Times that it recently leased a dedicated office space in Asia Square and that its team is scheduled to move into the space in early October once renovations are completed. In May, the group's CEO Arthur Mensch said the firm is looking to boost its headcount in Singapore from 40 to 100 by the year's end to cement the Republic as its South-east Asia hub. Mensch said that Singapore is a "great place to hire from", and that it will primarily employ local talent. He added that the firm has invested "multiple dozens of millions of dollars" into its Singapore operations. Keppel South Central in Hoe Chiang Road has also been attracting AI companies including Sierra. The conversational AI enterprise platform set up a few years ago in San Francisco by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, is said to have leased about 10,000 sq ft with the first right for another 10,000 sq ft. Sierra has also established a presence in Singapore through a partnership with Singtel earlier this year. The partnership will allow Singtel Singapore to tap Sierra's conversational AI expertise for customer service. At a Singtel event in June this year, Taylor shared that Sierra has hired about 30 people in Singapore - its fourth largest office outside the US. The AI firm opened an office in Singapore in November last year, serving as its regional headquarters for the South-east Asia region. Taylor is also the chairman of OpenAI's board. Manus on the move. Word on the street is that Manus AI is also heading to Keppel South Central. The Chinese-developed, Singapore-based firm is said to have committed to taking about half of the 20,714 sq ft that flexible workspace operator Industrious (formerly known as The Great Room) has leased in the 33-storey building. The Industrious facility occupies the entire Level 10 of Keppel South Central. The Manus deal with Industrious is said to give it the option to take the rest of Industrious' space on the 10th floor after a specified period. The Industrious facility officially opened in July. The autonomous AI agent startup had earlier this year moved into Meta's Singapore offices in Marina One, following its acquisition by Meta under a US$2 billion deal announced in December 2025. Manus is moving out of Meta's offices. This comes after China blocked the deal in April against the backdrop of heightened tech rivalry with the US, and required "the parties to withdraw from the acquisition transaction". On Tuesday (Aug 11), Manus said it would "soon return to operating as an independent company". Shaw Tower at Beach Road, where OpenAI is negotiating a lease, has 23 office floors ranging from about 18,000 to 19,000 sq ft per floor in the low zone and 19,000 sq ft to 20,000 sq ft in the high zone. The Business Times previously reported that the biggest tenant signed so far in the building is Allianz, which has leased about 78,000 sq ft in the low zone. Other tenants in the low zone include Industrious and Sanofi. Tenants in the high zone include payments technology firm Adyen and BeOne Medicines. The development also offers about 15,700 sq ft of retail/F&B offerings, including a rooftop restaurant. The project houses about 21,000 sq ft of community-centric facilities. The project is owned by Shaw Towers Realty, which sits under The Shaw Foundation Hong Kong. Lendlease was roped in to handle the development, project, construction, asset and property management. Property consultants have been enthusing about AI firms entering and expanding in Singapore, helping to provide a new pillar of office demand on the island. However, Savills Singapore executive director of research and consultancy Alan Cheong highlighted that "the AI technology is advancing rapidly - by the week - and we are not sure where the road will lead us to". "It is only when the tech stabilises that the AI firms can start developing permanent marketing and support roles. Only when this happens, we'll know that AI is an additional pillar of office demand," added Cheong. Additional reporting by Benjamin Cher