A European public cloud

Why this conversation

Every conversation about running infrastructure in Europe now reaches the same question within minutes: which cloud, and under whose law. Guido Laout runs the Netherlands business of OVHcloud, the European provider most often named when the answer is “not an American hyperscaler”. In ten minutes he makes the case for a European public cloud: what it is for, who it is for, and where it is heading.

The ground this stands on

The reason the question has teeth is regulatory as much as political. For regulated workloads, personal data under the GDPR, health data, public-sector systems, the certifications a provider holds decide what it can host: in France SecNumCloud and HDS, in Germany C5. European frameworks such as Gaia-X and the EU’s IPCEI-CIS investment programme are trying to turn that compliance landscape into an industry. OVHcloud sits in the middle of that picture: French-owned, with data centres across Europe, and positioned as the European alternative to the hyperscalers for exactly those workloads.

Notes on what Guido said will be completed when the episode is out.