Airbus just made a very deliberate choice about where its most sensitive data lives. And the answer is: not on American servers.
The European aerospace giant signed a multi-year agreement with Scaleway, the cloud computing arm of French telecom group Iliad, to build out sovereign cloud infrastructure for its defense, industrial, and AI workloads. The deal includes co-developing AI tools with Mistral AI, the French startup that has quietly become Europe’s answer to OpenAI.
What the deal actually involves
Airbus plans to migrate roughly 70 critical applications to Scaleway’s infrastructure by the end of 2028. That’s the opening act. The longer-term ambition is to shift around 900 applications over the next five to six years, which would represent a massive rewiring of how one of Europe’s largest defense contractors handles its most sensitive computing.
Scaleway didn’t win this on charm alone. The company cleared more than 150 technical and legal requirements during the selection process, including protections against so-called “kill switches.” In English: safeguards ensuring that no foreign government can remotely shut down or access Airbus’s infrastructure on a geopolitical whim.
