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 the context of the tripling of sovereign cloud spending forecast by 2027, Scaleway is positioned as a direct beneficiary — a European operator subject solely to EU and French data law, with no exposure to US CLOUD Act jurisdiction.

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. Scaleway offers cloud compute, object storage, managed Kubernetes, and GPU instances, and has made targeted investments in AI infrastructure to attract European AI startups and researchers seeking sovereign compute. Its parent Iliad Group also owns Free, one of France's largest mobile operators, giving Scaleway access to significant network infrastructure.

Scaleway's AI infrastructure push — including GPU cloud offerings targeted at French and European AI startups — positions it as a potential compute partner for companies such as Mistral AI that have European sovereignty requirements. The EC's DMA cloud probes into AWS and Azure in 2025 provided further tailwind for Scaleway's commercial proposition, reinforcing the narrative that the hyperscaler status quo is under regulatory challenge. However, Scaleway's absolute scale remains orders of magnitude below AWS and Azure, limiting its ability to serve the largest enterprise and government workloads.