Airbus selects Scaleway for defence AI in sovereignty drive
Airbus will migrate up to 900 applications to Iliad's Scaleway, choosing a European cloud provider to shield sensitive defence and aerospace AI from foreign legal reach.
Airbus has signed a multi-year agreement with Iliad-owned Scaleway to host sensitive industrial and defence applications. The deal marks a decisive step by a major European contractor to build artificial intelligence capabilities outside the orbit of foreign tech giants.
The planemaker will migrate around 70 critical applications to the French cloud provider by the end of 2028. Over the next five to six years, the broader programme could encompass up to 900 applications spanning aircraft design, engineering, production and corporate operations. Airbus did not disclose the financial terms of the contract.
The infrastructure agreement builds on a May partnership with French startup Mistral to co-develop customised AI tools for aerospace and defence. Having Mistral's models already running on Scaleway's servers was a key factor in the selection. "The fact that the Mistral models are already deployed on Scaleway infrastructure will allow us to accelerate our AI approach," said Airbus Chief Digital Officer Catherine Jestin.
For investors, the contract signals a commercial inflection point for Europe's domestic cloud sector, which has historically struggled to win business from dominant foreign providers. Airbus's decision to entrust certified aviation systems and military applications to Scaleway validates the thesis that regulatory pressures are creating a viable market for European digital infrastructure.
Jestin said Airbus evaluated Scaleway against more than 150 technical and legal requirements. Legal safeguards were the deciding factor for the manufacturer. "The second set of criteria concerned legal requirements, in particular the much-discussed protection against the kill switch and against the application of extraterritorial laws," she said.
European governments and corporations have grown increasingly wary of relying on non-European cloud providers for critical systems. Airbus explicitly wants European partners to manage the intellectual property, research and development, and sensitive data for its military and certified aviation AI.
This corporate procurement shift aligns with regulatory efforts in Brussels. The European Commission proposed a Cloud and AI Development Act last month aimed at expanding domestic computing capacity. By routing its AI workloads through French providers, Airbus is positioning itself ahead of potential mandates while dictating where its infrastructure spending will go.
