Scaleway

On 16 July 2026, Airbus picked Scaleway as its "cloud de confiance" for aircraft design, engineering, industrial production, operations and intellectual property, closing a tender opened in early January 2026 that weighed ten candidates on technological and AI capability, operational excellence, and legal and governance guarantees. The last criterion decided it. Scaleway is the cloud and AI subsidiary of iliad, led by Damien Lucas, who presents it as a European cloud provider immune to extraterritorial law: no exploitation of customer data by third-party authorities without a court decision, and no kill switch.

The same name recurs whenever a large European organisation has to place sensitive workloads. LVMH finished its PoCs and began deploying at Sephora and Louis Vuitton, covering sensitive data, European e-commerce workloads and cybersecurity solutions, with a significant footprint expected within 12 to 18 months. France Télévisions ran its ALIX platform on Scaleway without rewriting it. Delos Intelligence was still finishing its move at the end of 2025, its compute partly on Azure in France.

Damien Lucas keeps the mandate narrow: IaaS and PaaS, no verticalization, with an economic argument attached (one euro spent at Scaleway returns 68 centimes to Europe, against less than 20 at an American hyperscaler). What stays open sits above the infrastructure. The Airbus contract secures the first floor; sovereign training and inference on GPU is the layer where the next dependency forms, and the VivaTech 2026 partnership with ZML, VSORA and the Région Île-de-France aims there.