Brussels has picked its supplier. After a year of political noise about European technological sovereignty, the Commission has named Scaleway as a successful bidder on Cloud III, the multi-year Dynamic Purchasing System that will underpin much of the EU executive's own cloud and AI infrastructure.
The French cloud provider was selected to supply sovereign public cloud services and an integrated AI platform to EU institutions, agencies and bodies across the Commission's Directorate-General for Digital Services. Cloud III, launched in 2025, succeeds the earlier Cloud II framework and runs alongside the AI-focused EU AI-PACT. It is the contracting vehicle the Commission uses to operationalise the ideas floated in the Sovereign Cloud Concept paper and the broader EuroStack discussions.
The selection is a material datapoint in the sovereignty argument, because it moves the question from declarations to procurement. For the past two years European policy has been framed around dependency risk — who holds the keys, where the data sits, which law prevails in a conflict between jurisdictions. With Cloud III, the Commission is now buying against those principles rather than debating them.
Scaleway frames its position as a Europe-by-default stack. Its AI offering is built on open-weight models accessible via what the company calls its Generative APIs, and on dedicated GPU infrastructure hosted in data centres physically and legally inside the EU. That combination matters because sovereignty arguments fall apart the moment inference traffic has to leave the jurisdiction to reach a proprietary model; open weights running on EU hardware close that loop.
At Scaleway, we are committed to contributing to Europe's digital autonomy, not only through our technology and our alignment with European regulatory frameworks, but also through how we build and invest in our ecosystem. Today, for every euro spent with Scaleway, around 68 cents are reinvested in the European economy, compared to around 20 cents when relying on international hyperscalers. Directing investment towards truly European cloud providers helps strengthen local capabilities and ensures that value, expertise and innovation remain anchored in Europe.
Two reservations worth holding. First, a DPS is a purchasing framework, not a contract — it qualifies suppliers, but the revenue only materialises through individual call-offs over the life of the agreement. Second, "sovereign" remains a political term with no fixed technical definition; Scaleway will need to hold a line on where services are run, who administers them, and under what law, as usage scales.
Set against that, Cloud III is the most concrete demand signal yet for EU-operated cloud and AI capacity. For Scaleway, which has been positioning itself as the commercial answer to the sovereignty question for some time, it is the validation that the political conversation has started to write cheques.
Scaleway, part of the Iliad Group, operates data centres in Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw and serves more than a million customers.
Read more: scaleway.com
