Storage vendor Scality and French cloud provider OVHcloud have expanded their technology partnership into a joint platform purpose-built for one problem: running AI workloads on data that legally and contractually cannot leave European, customer-controlled infrastructure.
What the platform actually does
Scality’s RING and ARTESCA products provide S3-compatible, GPU-direct object storage deployed on the customer’s own infrastructure, fast enough to feed AI training and MLOps pipelines directly rather than staging data through a separate layer. OVHcloud’s On-Prem Cloud Platform (OPCP) wraps that storage with cloud-native orchestration, a managed services catalogue, and deployment automation, built on a stack with no dependency on a foreign public cloud provider at any layer. A second option extends the same approach onto OVHcloud’s HGR-STOR bare metal range, giving organisations a private, S3-compatible off-site backup target that integrates with cyber-resilience tools like Veeam and Commvault.
Two deployment models cover most of the ground organisations actually need: a fully dedicated sovereign cloud, or true on-premises via OPCP, both with multi-availability-zone backup replication.
Why this is a compliance story as much as an infrastructure one
The target industries named in the announcement, healthcare, financial services, defense, and the public sector, are precisely the sectors carrying the heaviest EU regulatory weight right now. GDPR governs where personal data can legally sit. DORA requires financial entities to understand and control their ICT concentration risk, including cloud dependency. NIS2 imposes supply chain security obligations that are hard to satisfy when a critical data layer sits under a non-EU jurisdiction’s legal reach. A storage platform that keeps AI training data, model weights, and pipeline outputs inside a customer-controlled, EU-jurisdiction environment removes an entire category of question from a DORA concentration risk assessment or a NIS2 supply chain review, rather than requiring it to be argued case by case.
Part of a broader shift, not an isolated launch
This announcement lands a few weeks after the European Commission awarded its own €180 million sovereign cloud procurement contract to a group of providers including OVHcloud’s partner network, Scaleway, and STACKIT, and follows France’s move of its national Health Data Hub off Microsoft Azure onto Scaleway earlier this year. The direction of travel for regulated European workloads is consistent: away from US hyperscaler dependency for anything touching sensitive or regulated data, toward providers that can demonstrate EU legal and operational control end to end. Organisations still running AI or backup infrastructure on hyperscaler platforms for regulated workloads should treat launches like this one as a signal that credible, production-ready European alternatives now exist, not as a future consideration.
If your organisation needs to assess whether your AI or backup infrastructure meets DORA concentration risk or NIS2 supply chain requirements, or wants help evaluating European sovereign cloud alternatives like the Scality and OVHcloud platform against your current hyperscaler setup, contact Excello Digital. We help European organisations make cloud infrastructure decisions that hold up under regulatory scrutiny.