Mistral's $830m Debt Raise for Europe Data Centres

Mistral ("Frontier AI. In your hands"), a French AI startup led by ex-DeepMind Arthur Mensch, which has a "Donkey Kong room" in its Paris office, and not to be confused with Mistral Group (UK bus and coach provider), has raised money from a consortium of banks to run a new data center powered by Nvidia chips. A non-exhaustive list of banks involved include HSBC Holdings, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, BNP Paribas ("The bank for a changing world") and Credit Agricole CIB.

Decacorns

A decacorn is a privately held startup valued at more than $10bn - an extremely rate tier above "unicorn" status.  It is used in the venture capital world to denote exceptional scale, investor confidence and global growth potential.

Freight Fraud in Focus as KitKat Laments Loss of 400,000 chocolate bars

A truck carrying 400,000 chocolate bars has gone missing between production and distribution facilities in Europe. Happening a week before Easter, this has led to Nestlé issuing a warning that this could "lead to a shortage of KitKat on shelves". Concerns that such cargo crimes will be accelerated by AI has been expressed by global non-profit TAPA EMEA (Transported Asset Protection Association).

UK spread-better IG could move to the US

UK spread-better IG, which joined the FTSE100 recently, has launched a strategic review of its domicile.

Brent at $104, WTI at $97.55

Front month Brent (May 2026, K26) is at $104 a barrel, with the rest of the curve in backwardation (June 2026, J26, at 99.58).  Nymex WTI (April 2026, J26) is at 97.55 and is also in backwardation.

While 76K contracts traded on the most liquid WTI futures (second from front-month) no liquidity was seen on the corresponding options contracts.

Google Acquires Wiz for $32bn

Google has acquired Wiz, a cloud security company founded in 2020 that works across multiple cloud environments led by Assaf Rappaport (who previously founded Adallom, a cloud access security broker sold to Microsoft for around $320m). 

Wiz frames itself as "A new operating model for AI-era security".

Google was advised by Bank of America and Freshfields.  Wiz was advised by a slew of investment banks, including Barclays, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

Bank of America has expanded its technology banking team, including hiring Jason Rowe of Goldman Sachs and others from JP Morgan and Centerview Partners (Gary Kirkham).

McKinsey's AI System Hacked by Startup Codewall

Red-team security startup Codewall has an AI agent which hacked McKinsey's internal AI platform (called Lilli, rolled out in July 2023)  gaining full read-write access to their chatbot in under two hours.  The technique used was SQL injection.