Nvidia's position as the dominant supplier of artificial intelligence hardware is being reinforced by significant new orders and ambitious expansion into novel markets, despite recent stock price volatility. The company received a major boost from French AI firm Mistral AI, which announced it has raised $830 million in its first debt-financing round. Mistral plans to use these funds to build a new data center near Paris equipped with 13,800 of Nvidia's GB300 graphics-processing units (GPUs).
While exact financial terms were not disclosed, analysts at HSBC provided a benchmark, estimating that a GB300 NVL72 rack containing 72 GPUs costs about $3 million. Based on this, Mistral's planned deployment could translate into roughly $575 million worth of Nvidia hardware from this single data center project.
This development is part of a broader, accelerating trend in global AI infrastructure spending. Research firm Omdia reported that global spending on cloud infrastructure services reached $110.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, marking a 29% increase from a year earlier. The firm expects spending to grow by another 27% this year.
Nvidia's ambitions are extending beyond Earth. Space startup Starcloud announced it raised $170 million at a $1.1 billion valuation to advance its plans for space-based data centers. The company previously launched a satellite carrying one of Nvidia's H100 GPUs into orbit—the first time an AI model was trained in space. A second launch is planned for later this year, featuring a full GPU cluster and a large deployable radiator designed to generate 100 times the computing power of its first satellite.
In a proactive move to address challenges in orbital computing, Nvidia unveiled its Space-1 Vera Rubin computing module on March 16. This hardware is specifically designed to tackle data bottleneck issues in orbital data centers by processing data where it's generated, rather than sending raw data back to Earth for analysis.
Despite these strong demand signals, Nvidia's stock has faced pressure in recent months, falling nearly 20% from its October record high amid a broader market selloff. The decline has been driven partly by geopolitical concerns in the Middle East and fears that elevated oil prices could fuel inflation and prompt central banks to raise interest rates. Nvidia is now trading at about 19.6 times its expected earnings over the next 12 months, its lowest multiple since early 2019 and below the S&P 500's multiple of around 20 times earnings.
Investor concerns also center on whether heavy spending on AI infrastructure by major technology companies—including Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon, which are among Nvidia's largest customers—will translate into near-term returns. These worries have erased more than $800 billion from Nvidia's market value, which now stands at about $4 trillion. However, Nvidia continues to report strong financial performance, with gross margins reaching 75%, and analysts have raised their earnings estimates even as the stock price has declined.
