Iliad’s Scaleway bangs the digital sovereignty drum

• Iliad’s cloud and AI services unit is expanding to meet demand from European customers
• It is deploying new GPU clusters in Sweden and Denmark, and launching new cloud zones across the region
• The moves are all part of its plan to ‘develop, deploy and run AI’ in Europe and tap the growing demand for digital sovereign services

Scaleway, the cloud and AI unit of European telco Iliad Group, is investing in new infrastructure deployments in Scandinavia, expanding its compute capacity and adding to its technology partnerships as it positions itself to be a key provider of digital sovereign cloud and AI services in Europe. 

The company has a very clear aspiration: To deliver what it calls “technological autonomy” to European enterprises so they have “the ability to choose, develop and operate technologies from Europe”. And, according to research firm IDC, there is growing demand for digital sovereign services in Europe. 

The ambition isn’t new. Backed by the vision of telecom and tech entrepreneur Xavier Niel, Iliad – arguably the most successful alternative telco in Europe – has been investing in its cloud and AI infrastructure and platforms for years. It committed investments totalling €3bn into AI-dedicated infrastructure and platforms via its datacentre division OpCore, a joint venture with InfraVia, and Scaleway, which has been busy over the past year. 

In 2025, Scaleway formed the AION European AI consortium to accelerate sovereign service and infrastructure developments, and launch a French bid to be part of the European Union’s AI Gigafactories initiative. And it has been brokering other deals, such as this one with Airbus and this one with Tele2, as well as multiple partnerships that have already put it at the heart of Europe’s digital sovereign services sector. 

Now Scaleway has shifted up a gear, with news that it is to spread its wings and bulk up as it aims to “give European businesses the infrastructure, performance and technological freedom they need to develop, deploy and run AI applications from Europe.”

Bulking up

Scaleway is opening two new ‘Availability Zones (AZs)’ in Milan, bringing the total to three in its first Italian cloud region. “With three geographically separate and independent zones, Milan becomes a fully fledged cloud region, offering enterprise-grade resilience,” it noted.  

Then, in 2027, Scaleway will open three Availability Zones in Stockholm, Sweden, and three additional zones in Frankfurt, Germany. 

At the same time it will invest in “additional computing capacity through the development of GPU Zones, dedicated infrastructure designed to support large-scale AI model training and inference.”

One of these will be a new cluster of several thousand Nvidia B300 GPUs in Copenhagen, Denmark. Scaleway CEO Damien Lucas noted: “Access to high-performance AI computing is becoming a strategic priority for European organisations, and they increasingly want that capacity delivered by providers they can trust. With our new GPU Zone in Copenhagen, we’re responding to that demand by bringing the latest Nvidia technologies closer to customers, while staying true to our commitment to European technological independence.” 

Another will involve the deployment in Stockholm of an AI supercomputer based on a cluster of AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs, which Scaleway claims will be ”one of the first computing infrastructures of its kind from a European cloud provider”.

Scaleway added: “With GPU Zones in Paris, Copenhagen and Stockholm, Scaleway is building an infrastructure that will eventually represent tens of thousands of GPUs, tens of exaflops of computing power and tens of megawatts of capacity… These developments are part of a broader industrial ambition, notably reflected in Scaleway and Iliad Group’s participation in the European AI Gigafactory project.” 

Scaleway has also expanded its AI model catalogue to more than 40, “enabling businesses to choose the technologies best suited to their needs,” is working with French AI infrastructure firms VSORA and ZML to develop a new European AI inference offering based on VSORA’s Jotunn8 processor, and has struck a partnership with French startup Alatyr to explore the development of space-based datacentre infrastructure. 

And in 2027, it plans to launch its Unified Computing Service, “a new approach that will allow developers to run their programs across CPU, GPU and quantum computing resources without having to manage the underlying infrastructure”. The service will be supported in part by Qall, “an open-source toolkit to which Scaleway contributes, designed to simplify workload execution across different computing architectures”.

For more on all of these developments, and others, see this extensive Scaleway announcement. 

Scaleway, with the support of the Iliad Group, clearly believes there is an opportunity to generate new business opportunities by developing European-hosted and developed technology and services to meet the sovereignty demands of the region’s governments and enterprises, but is there any real chance of competing with the US hyperscalers, all of which have infrastructure and resources embedded in Europe and have far greater scale and resources? This is one of the key questions that will be addressed at the Digital Sovereignty Forum in London on 2 December. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV