Scaleway

Scaleway is a French cloud provider and a recurring reference point in European sovereign cloud debates, cited alongside Hetzner and OVHcloud as evidence that the EU has viable domestic alternatives to US hyperscalers. In April 2026 it became a direct awardee in the European Commission's €180m, six-year sovereign cloud framework, representing France as a standalone national provider and achieving SEAL-3 Digital Resilience, the highest sovereignty tier — unlike S3NS, which achieved only SEAL-2. The framework is the first pan-EU institutional sovereign cloud contract and will be cited as a reference contract in member-state tenders for six years.

Scaleway is a subsidiary of Iliad Group, the French telecoms conglomerate founded by billionaire Xavier Niel. Its data centres are concentrated in France — Paris and Vitry-sur-Seine — with additional capacity in Amsterdam and Warsaw. It offers cloud compute, object storage, managed Kubernetes, and GPU instances. Its parent Iliad also owns Free, one of France's largest mobile operators, giving Scaleway access to significant network infrastructure and reducing its dependency on external connectivity. European sovereign cloud spend is forecast to triple from roughly $7 billion in 2025 to $23 billion by 2027.

Scaleway's GPU cloud offering targets European AI startups and researchers with sovereignty requirements — a natural fit for the compute needs of companies such as Mistral AI. The DMA cloud probes into AWS and Azure in 2025 strengthened the commercial case for European alternatives. Scaleway's absolute scale remains orders of magnitude below the US hyperscalers, and the SEAL-3 framework win defines the ceiling for the workloads it must now prove it can serve.

Scaleway is now the only French cloud provider to hold two sovereign-framework wins in seven days. On 23 April 2026 France awarded Scaleway the national Health Data Hub hosting contract — a multi-year migration of millions of French citizens' health records off Microsoft Azure, reported at approximately €180m, with migration targeted for late 2026 to early 2027. This came within a week of its previously reported SEAL-3 slot in the European Commission's €180m sovereign cloud framework. The Health Data Hub win is strategically distinct from the EU framework: it is a national flagship contract involving one of France's most sensitive data categories, and its migration off Azure is a direct reversal of a 2020 decision that drew sustained civil-society criticism. The leaked CAIDA scope, confirmed by CNBC and gHacks in early May 2026, would bar US cloud providers from processing financial, judicial, and health data for EU public-sector clients — a regulation that would entrench Scaleway's position in exactly the workload categories it has now won. Scaleway carries no US CLOUD Act exposure, operates under French and EU data law exclusively, and is the highest-SEAL-rated standalone French provider in the EU institutional framework.