Who Owns Scaleway?

The business behind Scaleway predates the brand by sixteen years. Xavier Niel founded Online SAS in 1999 as a hosting and dedicated server provider, and Online.net became a known low-cost dedicated server operation inside Niel's iliad telecom empire, running its own data centers in the Paris region. The Dedibox dedicated server line it built in that era still ships today under the Scaleway name, one of the longest-running product lines in European hosting.

In 2015 the company rebranded as Scaleway and repositioned from traditional dedicated hosting toward cloud computing. It made an early technical bet that drew attention: launching ARM-based bare-metal cloud servers (the C1 line) when the industry was almost entirely x86, years before ARM cloud instances became a mainstream idea. The product range grew from dedicated Dedibox servers into a full cloud catalog: virtual Instances, Kubernetes Kapsule, object storage, serverless functions, and web hosting. A second rebrand around 2020 consolidated the catalog under the Scaleway Elements naming, and the company kept layering services typical of a hyperscaler catalog onto its European footprint.

Through it all the DNA stayed recognizably that of a French hosting shop scaled up: own the hardware, own the datacenters, price aggressively, and let the parent group's infrastructure carry the weight a standalone cloud startup could not.

The late 2010s and early 2020s were about scale and geography. Data centers came to cover Paris, Amsterdam, and Warsaw, and the service evolved into a credible European alternative pitch: cloud and AI infrastructure outside the American hyperscalers' jurisdiction. The brand's sovereign-cloud argument sharpened as EU policy moved against dependence on U.S. providers.

The AI wave repositioned the business again. Scaleway built out GPU compute offerings, including access to large Nvidia H100 clusters, positioning itself among Europe's largest providers of AI training capacity and adding quantum computing access via partnerships with French quantum hardware firms. iliad's 2025 annual reporting describes a sovereign public cloud platform backed by more than 400 developers, with operations in France, Poland, Italy, and the Netherlands and planned deployments in Sweden and Germany.

The parent has put real capital behind the pitch. iliad's AI investment program, announced in 2023 at roughly EUR 200 million, funded the GPU buildout that turned Scaleway from a budget hosting brand into the group's answer to European demand for non-American AI infrastructure.

The brand's headcount reflects steady investment: Scaleway employs approximately 600 people, mostly in Paris and Lille, and third-party estimates put its annual revenue above EUR 100 million, though iliad does not break out subsidiary results publicly.