Scaleway

What Scaleway actually is

Scaleway is the cloud arm of Iliad, the French telecom group behind the Free mobile and broadband brands, and it occupies a deliberate middle position in European hosting: more managed services and far more GPUs than Hetzner, smaller and more developer-focused than OVHcloud. It runs from Paris-region datacenters its group built, plus regions in Warsaw, Amsterdam and Milan and, since November 2025, capacity in Germany. If you want European infrastructure for AI workloads specifically, Scaleway is the name that keeps coming up, and for once the reputation matches the hardware: its Nabuchodonosor cluster runs on more than a thousand Nvidia H100 GPUs, with over five thousand GPUs across the platform by the company’s count.

The corporate story underneath has more moving parts than the brand suggests, and two of them changed recently enough that most coverage has not caught up.

From Online.net to Xavier Niel’s cloud

The company is old by internet standards. It began in 1999 as Online, Iliad’s hosting business, sold dedicated servers as Dedibox from 2006, and in 2013 launched something genuinely ahead of its time: a cloud built on ARM processors, custom hardware manufactured near Laval, years before Amazon’s own ARM chips. The Scaleway brand dates from 2015. Leadership has turned over in the modern era: Yann Lechelle ran it from 2020 to the end of 2022, Damien Lucas has been chief executive since 2023, and the CTO is Jean-Baptiste Kempf, best known as the president of VideoLAN, the VLC project.

Control is simple and absolute. Xavier Niel founded Online’s parent Iliad, and after his 2021 tender offer and squeeze-out he holds over 96 percent of the group, which he took off the Paris stock exchange. One person effectively controls the chain from your virtual machine up. Whether that is a feature or a risk depends on your model of concentrated ownership; either way it is the opposite of a dispersed cap table, and it is register-verifiable through the French RCS (Scaleway SAS, SIREN 433 115 904, held via an Iliad holding entity).

The datacenters are half sold, which nobody mentions

Here is the recent change that matters most for the Independence axis. In 2023, Scaleway spun its physical datacenters out into a separate company, OpCore, and in a deal closed after December 2024, Iliad sold 50 percent of OpCore to InfraVia Capital Partners, a Paris private-equity infrastructure firm, at an 860 million euro enterprise value, to fund a hyperscale buildout. Scaleway’s own impact report now refers to “OpCore’s DC5 datacenter” for the site its AI cluster lives in.

Read carefully, this stays European: OpCore and InfraVia are both French, French-law entities. But InfraVia’s latest 8 billion euro fund was, in the trade press’s words, buoyed by non-European investors, so capital with non-European origins now sits behind half of the buildings Scaleway’s cloud runs in. “Our own datacenters” is still how the marketing reads; “buildings operated by a 50/50 joint venture between our parent and a private-equity fund” is what the filings say. The distinction is exactly the kind this directory exists to surface, and the dossier above reflects it.

Jurisdiction: French, with one certification still missing

Scaleway is French-incorporated, GDPR-governed, with no US parent and, unlike OVHcloud, no North American subsidiary for a foreign court to squeeze (a Canadian court ordered OVH data handed over in 2024 through exactly that route). On paper this is one of the cleanest jurisdiction stories in European cloud.

The gap is SecNumCloud, ANSSI’s certification for state-grade sovereign hosting and the credential French public-sector buyers increasingly require. Scaleway entered the qualification process in August 2025 with a stated aim of finishing by the end of that year; as of July 2026 it still appears on ANSSI’s “in progress” list, while OVHcloud already holds the qualification. Scaleway markets itself with phrases like “the most sovereign cloud provider in Europe”; the French state’s own register does not yet agree, and that is checkable by anyone. It does hold ISO 27001 and the French health-data authorisation. One further caveat we could not run to ground: a 2025 third-party analysis, cited by two independent comparisons but not locatable at its source, reportedly found US-based services in Scaleway’s own management console. We could not verify it, and say so rather than repeat it as fact.

The AI bet

Scaleway’s clearest niche is European GPU compute. The Nabuchodonosor supercomputer (Nvidia DGX H100s, over a thousand GPUs) launched in 2023; Iliad has since announced 3 billion euro for AI infrastructure across the group, and Mistral AI and Hugging Face appear among Scaleway’s customers. One precision the press coverage routinely fumbles: Kyutai, the open-science AI lab Niel co-funds, is a separate Iliad-group initiative that runs on Scaleway compute; it is not a Scaleway product. And the sovereignty of the GPU story has a supplier-side asymmetry nobody European has solved: the chips are Nvidia’s, on which every “sovereign AI cloud” on the continent equally depends.

Track record: candid when it breaks, restless with products

Scaleway’s worst recent outage was self-inflicted and well-handled: in September 2024 a BGP failure cascaded through its two oldest Paris availability zones for about four and a half hours, and the company published a detailed, self-critical postmortem naming its own outgrown software as the cause. That level of engineering candour is rare and counts in its favour. No fire or catastrophic data-loss event is on record (the notorious 2021 datacenter fire was OVHcloud’s, in Strasbourg, a different company).

The less flattering pattern is product restlessness. The original ARM instance line, the company’s founding bet, was end-of-lifed in 2020 on months’ notice; the C14 Classic cold-storage product was discontinued; bare-metal ESXi support was sunset. For a stable workload measured in years, Scaleway’s history says: expect migrations. Pricing sits between Hetzner and the hyperscalers, with free egress as a genuine differentiator against AWS; independent benchmarks are scarce enough that we would treat specific “x times cheaper” multipliers, ours or anyone’s, as directional.

Who it fits, and who it doesn’t

Scaleway fits teams that want managed services (Kubernetes, serverless, databases) or serious GPU capacity under French law from a provider with no US ownership anywhere in the chain, and are comfortable with a group controlled outright by one billionaire. For European AI workloads it is arguably the default choice, and its transparency in failure is a real trust signal.

It fits less well if your requirement is the certified French sovereign tier today (that is OVHcloud, until ANSSI says otherwise), if your workloads live for a decade untouched (the product-sunset record argues against), or if your independence standard extends to the physical buildings, half of which now belong to a private-equity joint venture that the marketing does not mention. As throughout this directory, the score reflects the filings, and the filings have been more talkative than the brand lately.

Sources

• Pappers / RCS Paris: Scaleway SAS, SIREN 433115904
• Telecompaper: Niel’s holding raises Iliad stake above 96%, squeeze-out
• Reuters: Niel offers to buy out and delist Iliad
• InfraVia: Iliad and InfraVia close OpCore transaction
• DataCenterDynamics: InfraVia to acquire 50 percent of Iliad’s OpCore
• Infrastructure Investor: InfraVia closes sixth fund on €8bn hard-cap
• ANSSI: SecNumCloud, providers in qualification
• Scaleway: SecNumCloud qualification process announcement
• Scaleway: September 2024 VPC incident postmortem
• Scaleway: Nabuchodonosor AI supercomputer
• Data Centre Magazine: How the Iliad Group plans to invest €3 billion in AI
• DataCenterDynamics: Scaleway launches cloud region in Milan
• DataCenterDynamics: Iliad’s Scaleway to break off datacenter unit into OpCore
• Wikipedia: Scaleway