Over the next five to six years, the program could eventually expand to cover as many as 900 applications, a significant leap from the initial 70. The announcement follows more than a year of quiet preparations.
The selection process began last year, when Airbus started looking for a European cloud provider capable of taking over part of the workload previously hosted by Google and Microsoft. The search was driven primarily by concerns over the extraterritorial reach of U.S. legislation—most notably the CLOUD Act, which allows the U.S. government to request access to data held by American companies regardless of where that data is physically stored.
For a company like Airbus, which manufactures both commercial aircraft and military equipment, such a theoretical vulnerability—sometimes informally described as a "kill switch," the possibility that a foreign provider could suddenly block access to or expose critical systems—was more than an abstract compliance issue. It was a strategic risk the company ultimately decided it could no longer accept.
The decision was neither symbolic nor rushed. Scaleway was selected after being evaluated against more than 150 technical and legal criteria, and the French provider was far from the only serious contender.
The company strengthened its credibility in April 2026, when the European Commission selected it to provide a sovereign public cloud and AI platform for EU institutions—a form of institutional endorsement that carried considerable weight during Airbus's evaluation.
Speaking to Reuters, Airbus Chief Digital Officer Catherine Jestin said that one of the key groups of selection criteria focused specifically on legal protection against the application of extraterritorial legislation and against the risk that access to critical infrastructure could be disrupted from outside Europe.
That distinction is important because it shows the decision was driven not by economic patriotism or a desire to support a European technology company, but by a detailed contractual risk assessment.
The migration itself, however, does not represent a complete or irreversible departure from the company's existing IT infrastructure.
In an interview with The Register, Airbus explained that it will continue working with U.S. software providers such as Salesforce, Coupa, and Workday for applications considered less sensitive, suggesting a strategy of risk segmentation rather than a wholesale break with the American cloud ecosystem.
The workloads being transferred to Scaleway are precisely those Airbus considers essential to what it internally describes as the company's "minimum viable enterprise." These include ERP systems, manufacturing execution platforms, customer relationship management software, product lifecycle management systems, and engineering tools used directly in aircraft design and development.
The new infrastructure will also host the AI technologies being developed under Airbus's partnership with the French startup Mistral AI, announced earlier this year. The collaboration focuses on artificial intelligence applications for aviation and defense, and according to Jestin, the fact that Mistral's models already run on Scaleway provided an additional incentive to accelerate cooperation between the two companies.
The agreement comes amid growing pressure across Europe to reduce technological dependence on major American cloud providers.
Just one month before Airbus's announcement, the European Commission proposed legislation aimed specifically at expanding cloud computing and AI infrastructure within the European Union, with the goal of increasing computing capacity under European ownership.
Airbus itself had already inaugurated two next-generation supercomputers in April, built in partnership with Bull, as part of its broader effort to strengthen its sovereign computing capabilities.
Taken together, these developments point in the same direction: for industries regarded as strategically important—including defense, aerospace, and critical infrastructure—an increasing number of European companies are concluding that the scale advantages offered by U.S. cloud giants no longer outweigh the legal and geopolitical risks associated with depending on them.
Even so, it remains unclear how far Europe's push toward digital sovereignty can realistically go.
European cloud providers, despite their growing political support, still lack both the scale and the technological maturity of their American competitors. Airbus itself publicly acknowledged this gap, noting that at the outset of the selection process it was far from certain that any European provider would be capable of hosting applications of such strategic importance.
Ultimately, the issue is not primarily financial but one of control: who holds the legal and technical authority over the data of a company that designs both commercial airliners and military systems?
For its most sensitive applications, Airbus appears to have arrived at a clear answer.
That answer is Europe.