Europe’s largest aerospace company just made a very deliberate choice about where its most sensitive data will live. And the answer is: not with Amazon, Microsoft, or Google.
Airbus signed a multi-year partnership with Scaleway, the cloud computing arm of French telecom group Iliad, to build sovereign cloud infrastructure for defense and industrial workloads. The deal, announced on July 16, will see roughly 70 critical applications migrated to Scaleway’s platform by the end of 2028, with the potential to scale that number to around 900 applications spanning aircraft design, engineering, and production.
Why this matters beyond the defense sector
The selection process was anything but casual. Scaleway had to clear more than 150 technical and legal requirements during Airbus’s evaluation, a bar specifically designed to ensure alignment with the company’s stringent security standards for classified and certified aviation work.
The partnership will also incorporate AI tools from Mistral AI, the Paris-based startup that has become Europe’s flagship large language model developer. Those tools are intended to boost operational efficiency across military and certified aviation applications.
