By Elvira Pollina and Gianluca Lo Nostro
MILAN/PARIS, March 19 (Reuters) – Scaleway, a cloud service provider owned by France’s Iliad, will open a new cloud region in Milan and is planning a further European expansion, as it seeks to compete with U.S. technology giants dominating the European market, it said on Thursday.
Europe lacks large homegrown cloud computing companies, known as hyperscalers, and rising tensions ranging from foreign policy to regulations have fuelled calls within the European Union to reduce reliance on U.S. hyperscalers.
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud control around 70% of the EU cloud market, according to a study published by the European Parliament in December.
Scaleway, which already operates cloud regions in France, Poland and the Netherlands, hopes to win over clients seeking a Europe-based alternative that fully complies with local regulations. It also plans to add soon two more cloud regions, in Sweden and Germany, with the locations yet to be chosen.
“Europe cannot rely entirely on foreign hyperscalers to power its digital economy,” CEO Damien Lucas said in a statement.
Cloud regions are locations where providers house the infrastructure that supports applications and stores customer data. Milan, with its abundant infrastructure and role as a hub for global corporations, has become a preferred location for power-hungry artificial intelligence data centres in Europe.
While Scaleway’s product catalogue broadly matches what larger competitors offer, its scale remains smaller, and achieving the expansion needed to close that gap requires heavy capital spending.
Iliad disclosed plans last year to invest 3 billion euros ($3.45 billion) in artificial intelligence infrastructure.
($1 = 0.8688 euros)
(Reporting by Elvira Pollina, Gianluca Lo Nostro; Additional reporting by Leo Marchandon; Editing by Andrei Khalip)
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