Marc Oman leaves Google to lead energy and infrastructure at Mistral Compute as firm targets 1 GW by 2030

Marc Oman, who spent nearly 12 years at Google leading European energy and infrastructure deals, has joined Mistral Compute - the newly formed subdivision of the French AI lab that provides private high-performance computing resources for training and running AI models^[1]. The hire lands days after Mistral closed a €3 billion Series D on 8 September 2026, the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company, at a post-money valuation above €21 billion.

What Oman brings

At Google, Oman served as global lead for Google Cloud's electricity decarbonisation strategy across more than 20 energy markets in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. He personally led the closing of more than 2 GW of solar and wind power purchase agreements across nine European countries - Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden^[1]. That track record in large-scale renewable procurement is directly relevant to what Mistral now needs: not just compute capacity, but the power contracts to run it.

Oman will be based in Paris, where Mistral recently opened new headquarters^[1].

The infrastructure program behind the hire

Mistral Compute was launched in June 2025 as a €4 billion investment program in data centers across France and Sweden, with a stated roadmap of 200 MW of capacity by 2027 and 1 GW by 2030. The program currently rests on three sites:

• A 44 MW training facility at Bruyères-le-Châtel, south of Paris, running 13,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GB300 GPUs, operational since early 2026
• A 10 MW inference facility at Les Ulis, also in the Essonne department south of Paris, scheduled for full operation in Q3 2026
• A site in Borlänge, Sweden, backed by a €1.2 billion investment announced in February 2026, planned to host Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs through 2027

Mistral currently operates less than 200 MW of capacity in total, meaning the 1 GW target by 2030 requires roughly a fivefold expansion from where the company stands today.

The Series D and what it funds

The €3 billion Series D was led by Samsung Electronics, with the EU-backed Scaleup Europe Fund - managed by EQT and making its first investment from Brussels' €5 billion public vehicle - and existing investor PSG Equity as co-leads. New investors include Advent, funds managed by BlackRock, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Mistral's valuation has nearly doubled from the €11.7 billion mark set at its September 2025 Series C, which was led by ASML.

^[1]Mistral noted it plans to spend a large portion of the new funding on compute. The infrastructure financing structure increasingly resembles project finance rather than conventional venture: Mistral raised $830 million in debt from a seven-bank consortium - including BNP Paribas and Bpifrance - in March 2026 to purchase GPUs for the Bruyères-le-Châtel facility, and Mistral Compute's customer contracts are structured around multi-year commitments designed to underwrite capacity before it is built.

What to watch

The energy procurement question is now the operational constraint. Scaling from sub-200 MW to 1 GW across European sites by 2030 will require power agreements of a scale that few European AI companies have attempted - which is precisely the gap Oman's background is meant to close. Whether Mistral can replicate the long-term PPA structures that Google built over a decade, and do so fast enough to keep pace with its capital deployment, is the test his appointment sets up.