# Scaleway **Scaleway** is a French cloud and AI provider, part of the Iliad group, offering 100+ cloud services across compute, storage, databases, AI, and networking. It positions itself as a sovereign European alternative to AWS, GCP, and Azure, with full data residency in France and the EU. ## Why it matters Three forces make Scaleway worth knowing: 1. **Data sovereignty by default**; everything is hosted in European datacenters, under French jurisdiction, outside the reach of the US CLOUD Act. 2. **AI infrastructure for European AI labs**; runs the GPU clusters behind [[Mistral AI]] and serves Hugging Face and others. Custom AI clusters for foundation model training. 3. **Open and interoperable**; deliberate stance against vendor lock-in; standard APIs, open formats, portable Kubernetes. ## Key infrastructure - **Regions**: 9 availability zones across 3 European regions (Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw) - **GPU fleet**: 5,000+ GPUs available; L40S, L4, NVIDIA H100, B300-SXM - **Bare metal**: Dedibox, Elastic Metal, and Apple Mac mini servers - **Generative APIs**: serverless and dedicated LLM endpoints - **Managed services**: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, serverless SQL, Kubernetes ## Privacy positioning - French jurisdiction; GDPR-native, not GDPR-retrofitted - Outside US extraterritorial laws (no CLOUD Act exposure) - Standard open APIs reduce migration cost away from Scaleway itself ## Notable customers [[Mistral AI]], Hugging Face, Aternos, France Télévisions, various French government institutions. ## My take For European builders concerned about data sovereignty or US extraterritorial reach, Scaleway is the most mature option. It doesn't match the breadth of [[OpenAI]] or [[Anthropic]] for frontier model access, but for infrastructure and open-model serving it is a credible sovereign alternative. The fact that Mistral AI runs on Scaleway tells you most of what you need to know about its position in the European AI stack. ## References - https://www.scaleway.com ## Related - [[Mistral AI]] - [[AI Privacy]]