Scaleway — AI supply-chain exposure

Scaleway is the cloud arm of France's Iliad Group, operating one of Europe's larger GPU clusters. It rents AI compute — the racks of accelerators startups need to train and serve models — from data centers on European soil, under European ownership and jurisdiction. That last point is the whole pitch: it was an early compute supplier to Mistral and positions itself as a sovereign alternative to the American hyperscalers for European AI builders.

Its structural hook is sovereignty rather than scale. Scaleway cannot match the raw capacity of the global cloud giants, but it offers something they structurally cannot — compute governed entirely by European rules, which matters to governments and regulated buyers wary of foreign control over critical AI infrastructure. The model places it as a regional producer of sovereign compute: strategically distinctive, but modest in the chain next to the hyperscalers and the chipmakers upstream of it.