Milan’s Domyn Raises Over $1bn—Europe’s Largest AI Round, Mostly in Debt
August 20, 2026 – 3:55 pm
Credit: Domyn
Domyn has raised more than $1bn, making it one of the largest financings a European AI company has ever announced, yet only about a tenth of it is equity. The Milan company took roughly $1.1bn in total, split about 10% equity and 90% debt, according to Sifted. This structure is notable because it is typical when financing hardware rather than hiring researchers.
Mistral previously took $830m from seven banks to build its own data center outside Paris. European AI companies are discovering that lenders will finance GPU-driven data centers on terms that venture funds typically wouldn’t offer.
What Domyn is building is Colosseum, a supercomputer in southern Italy assembled with Nvidia and Vertiv. It runs 80 Nvidia GB200 NVL72 systems, close to 6,000 Grace Blackwell chips, drawing about 7MW, and is rated at 115 exaflops—purpose-built for models exceeding a trillion parameters.
Founded in Milan in 2016 as iGenius by Uljan Sharka, who still leads it, Domyn rebranded to its current name last year. It sells to banks, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors, and governments, arguing that these buyers want to own AI models rather than rent access.
"We saw a white space not just enabling regulated industries to adopt AI, but to actually own and be an AI company in their market,” Sharka told Semafor in April.
Domyn offers customers access to the codebase and pre-training on their own data, and models are distributed through Microsoft’s Foundry platform.
Domyn has shipped two models, a general-purpose version and a larger, mission-critical system it has benchmarked against GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. These comparisons remain unindependent.
The company aims to invest $10bn over three years and reach €1bn in revenue, starting from a base in the tens of millions of annual recurring revenue.
"$1 trillion is the new unicorn right now," Sharka acknowledged.
The European AI buildout has been more announced than delivered. Brussels launched bidding on seven AI gigafactories in a €30bn program, French consortia bid $10bn for one site, and delays have alienated partners. Italy, meanwhile, is moving separately with a €1bn national AI fund and penalties for misuse. Domyn stands out as a private beneficiary of this positioning, collaborating with Nvidia and Abu Dhabi’s G42 on Italy’s supercomputer.
Scepticism about the European push abounds, with some arguments well-founded. Renting capacity through a GPU-as-a-service layer reinforces the illusion of sovereignty rather than delivering it, making Domyn’s decision to own the hardware more noteworthy than the headline number. Owning it also means carrying the cost of depreciation.