• The companies are targeting enterprise customers with public and private cloud combo
• Iliad-owned Scaleway brings European public cloud to Tele2’s portfolio
• Scaleway was recently named as a key EU cloud provider and launched a sovereign deal with Poland’s Play

Tele2 has unveiled a sovereign cloud and AI offering in partnership with Scaleway that aims to tackle the Swedish business-to-business (B2B) market.

The partnership will combine Scaleway’s European public cloud and AI with Tele2’s existing private cloud services to offer customers a hybrid solution that can manage and store sensitive data on a sovereign private cloud but can scale with public cloud capacity.

“Our partnership with Scaleway is a direct answer to Swedish organisations’ demand for sovereign, scalable cloud and AI. This move solidifies our leading position in the Swedish B2B segment, combining our expertise in private cloud with a leading European public cloud platform to create a single, seamless hybrid solution. Having a major customer on board from day one confirms we are meeting a critical need in the market,” said Stefan Trampus, executive vice president for B2B at Tele2.

Scaleway is owned by Xavier Neil’s Iliad Group, which also effectively took control of Tele2 when it bought a 19.8% stake in the Swedish operator in 2024. But the cloud company has been making a splash in the sovereign space in other markets.

Last year, Scaleway formed a strategic alliance with Polish telco Play – also part of the Iliad Group – to develop a sovereign cloud and AI platform for businesses in Poland.

It was also recently handpicked by the European Union as one of four cloud providers under the European Commission’s €180m cloud procurement programme, which will enable EU institutions, bodies and agencies to access sovereign cloud services over a period of up to six years.

“Sweden is one of Europe’s most digitally mature markets, and we see enormous potential here. Launching our services in partnership with a strong player like Tele2 is a great start. Together, we can offer a credible and competitive European alternative that empowers Swedish businesses to innovate and scale while preserving their technological autonomy and control over the technology foundation their most strategic workloads depend on,” said Damien Lucas, CEO of Scaleway.

The Iliad Group is investing around €3bn into cloud and AI. The lion’s share of the investment – €2.5bn billion – is being allocated to Iliad’s subsidiary, OpCore, to build massive, next-generation datacentres, while Scaleway has been expanding into new markets.

The partnership comes in what has been a big week for sovereign services in the telecom space. Dutch operator KPN has also announced a sovereign cloud offering, working with Stackit, the cloud platform of German multinational Schwarz Group.

While nearly every day brings news of a new sovereign digital services offering, the debate still rages as to what exactly defines a sovereign service (and there was certainly no consensus among the nine telcos that responded to questions for our Digital Sovereignty: What It Means for Telcos report.

The topic is examined in detail in the latest Unthinkable Lab Report: The Telecoms

Sovereignty Gap – How to Bridge it, which looks at the “widening ‘sovereignty gap’ – the growing disconnect between the desire for sovereign infrastructure and the practical ability to achieve it.” 

Keep up to date with all the latest hot digital sovereignty trends in the dedicated sovereignty section of the TelecomTV website. 

- James Pearce, Editor, TelecomTV