Scaleway has been selected to host France's Health Data Hub (HDB), the state-backed platform that centralises the country's health research data, including a copy of the main National Health Data System (SNDS) database. The French cloud provider will take over the infrastructure following a selection process the HDB ran against more than 350 technical criteria covering security, resilience, performance and the ability to operate at scale.
Scaleway already holds the HDS certification required to host health data in France and is pursuing SecNumCloud qualification, the national standard for sensitive public-sector workloads. The company said autonomy from third-party providers was explicitly part of the HDB's evaluation, alongside the more familiar compliance and performance criteria.
We are proud to have been selected by the Health Data Hub following an extremely competitive selection process, and we look forward to writing this new chapter in HDH's history together. Far more than a public procurement contract, this decision represents a genuine technological partnership. It is also a symbol — to the entire healthcare sector and, more broadly, to all those who still see the cloud in a certain way: a credible and competitive European alternative does exist.
The HDB announcement lands days after Scaleway was named one of a handful of providers selected under the European Commission's €180 million sovereign cloud tender, and alongside existing partnerships with Paris Santé Campus and the Alliance Santé IA programme run by Montpellier University Hospital and Adlin Science. Scaleway, a subsidiary of the iliad Group, said its acquisition of French DataOps platform Saagie would underpin the data orchestration layer used by HDB stakeholders.
For the Health Data Hub, the stated ambition goes beyond hosting. The platform is intended to make it easier for health researchers and innovators to actually use SNDS-derived data inside a secure framework, particularly for AI-driven research — an area where European data-sovereignty concerns have slowed adoption.
