Scaleway: what the record shows for developer teams leaving AWS

Scaleway is not an independent company: it is a wholly owned subsidiary of Iliad, the French telecom group built by Xavier Niel, whose family holds roughly 52 percent of Iliad according to Scaleway’s own legal notice. For a sovereignty review, that plain ownership chain works in Scaleway’s favour: there is no ambiguity about who sits above it, no maze of holding companies to trace. Whether the chain counts as verified or claimed is a separate question, and one worth answering precisely before recommending Scaleway as a European alternative to AWS.

Scaleway SAS is registered in Paris under SIREN 433115904, and that registration, along with the fact that French law and GDPR govern it directly, is checked against the register rather than taken on trust. The ownership detail, Iliad as parent, the Niel family as ultimate beneficial owner, is sourced to Scaleway’s own legal notice page. Plausible, consistent with what is publicly known about Iliad’s structure, but not independently cross-checked here, so it stays marked as a claim.

The infrastructure story is where Scaleway differs most from the two providers it usually gets compared to. Its data centres sit in Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan, all self-declared, all inside the EU or EEA. Scaleway says these are its own facilities with no disclosed third-party dependency for its core regions, which, if independently confirmed, would put it ahead of any provider leasing capacity from a subcontractor. On certification, Scaleway holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and France’s HDS qualification for health data hosting. It does not yet hold SecNumCloud, the ANSSI qualification OVHcloud already carries for parts of its stack. Scaleway’s own materials describe that qualification as in process rather than complete, a gap disclosed plainly rather than glossed over, and one that matters for anyone whose workload specifically calls for SecNumCloud rather than general European hosting.

On the environmental side, which sits outside the sovereignty score but feeds a separate trust rating, Scaleway claims 100 percent renewable electricity backed by Guarantees of Origin, an EcoVadis Gold Medal from 2024, and an average PUE of 1.37. All claimed, all sourced to Scaleway’s own environmental page rather than an external auditor’s report.

For a developer team leaving AWS, the questions that ask who Scaleway is and what law binds it rest on register-checked ground: a Paris SIREN entry, French and EU law applying directly. Everything past that, the ownership detail, the data centre ownership, the certification in hand and the one still pending, is Scaleway describing itself, sourced but not yet cross-checked against an outside register. That is a typical starting point for a cloud provider’s public claims, worth knowing in detail rather than assuming. The dossier at /listings/scaleway/ lays out each claim with its source and the score as it stands today.