Article by **Jens Kengelbach**, **Daniel Friedman**, **Lianne Pot**, **Georg Keienburg** and **Tobias Söllner** (**Boston Consulting Group**), published on **September 21, 2026** in the series *The 2026 M&A Report* (~12 min). The displayed title is "How Non-AI Companies Win at AI Dealmaking"; the page and URL title is "How Non-Tech Companies Should Buy AI in 2026."
#AI M&A#M&A#AI dealmaking
Jens Kengelbach · Daniel Friedman · Lianne Pot · Georg Keienburg · Tobias Söllner — Boston Consulting Group ; série *The 2026 M&A Report*.
SFEIR analysis (firm's voice) of the decision, announced on July 16, 2026, by **Airbus** to select **Scaleway** (**iliad** group) as its **"trusted cloud"** to host and modernize its critical business applications and most sensitive data (aircraft design, engineering, industrial production, operations, intellectual property). At the end of a tender opened in **early January 2026** comparing **ten candidates**, Scaleway wins on **three criteria** — technological/AI capabilities, operational excellence, and above all **legal and governance guarantees**: European jurisdiction, genuine data protection, **immunity from** the US **Cloud Act**. SFEIR stresses the **reversal of hierarchy**: governance weighed more heavily than functionality, even though US hyperscalers (Microsoft, Google, AWS) retain a functional superiority that no European player matches "across the board." The agreement, multi-year and of undisclosed amount, **complements** (does not replace) Airbus's **multicloud** strategy — the doctrine the firm advocates: assembling a portfolio in which each workshop operates according to its own constraints, while retaining the **power to change** (reversibility, cf. France Télévisions/ALIX deployed without rewriting). The real stake is **IA souveraine**: running models on industrial data (simulation, predictive maintenance, assisted engineering) requires a **complete chain — compute, training, inference — kept within a trusted jurisdiction**. Three lessons: a **credibility threshold** crossed for European sovereign cloud; **governance > features** for strategic data; sovereignty is built **in layers** (infrastructure → platform → model), and the decisive part — AI reversibility — will play out in the coming months.