EU Picks Scaleway to Run Sovereign Cloud for Institutions

The European Commission has chosen Scaleway, the cloud arm of French group Iliad, to build and operate a sovereign public cloud and AI platform for EU institutions. No contract value is disclosed in the announcement. The source is Iliad.

This is a procurement signal, not a technology one. The EU is buying independence from US hyperscalers. Scaleway wins not because its chips are faster but because its legal domicile is European. Sovereignty is now a procurement criterion that beats raw performance.

Watch whether this tender becomes a template. If EU agencies standardize on domicile-first cloud buying, American and Asian cloud providers lose a category of public-sector revenue by rule, not by competition. The market shift is not about capability. It is about which jurisdiction the data lives in.