Nantes, France — Clever Cloud, a European cloud provider, announces the public beta launch of Clever Kubernetes Engine (CKE) on April 27, 2026, in the afternoon. The product will be previewed at Devoxx starting April 22, where attendees will be able to test it directly at the Clever Cloud booth.

Built for production and scalability

Kubernetes has become the standard for container orchestration. Clever Cloud spent two years developing a managed, sovereign version designed to integrate naturally into the Clever Cloud ecosystem and operate with the same simplicity as the platform's other services. CKE is built to handle real production workloads, with high scalability and predictable behavior at scale.

To achieve this, Clever Cloud developed Materia etcd, a reimplementation of Kubernetes' internal consistency layer built on FoundationDB. This foundational work — invisible to the end user — is what guarantees CKE's robustness and stability in production, notably through native auto-scaling and auto-healing capabilities.

CKE integrates natively with existing Clever Cloud services — Cellar object storage (S3-compatible), managed databases, IAM as a Service, Network Groups — and remains accessible via standard industry tools: kubectl, Helm, or GitOps.

Sovereign by design

Hosted and operated in Europe by Clever Cloud on its public cloud, CKE offers organizations a concrete alternative to the Kubernetes offerings of major American platforms, without compromising on performance or legal data control. CKE can also be deployed on the customer's own on-premises infrastructure.

Access details

The public beta is open to all Clever Cloud customers from April 27, 2026, via feature activation performed by the user. Notably, some customers have already had access through a private test for over six months, allowing the product to be refined before this general release.

"Clever Cloud has long developed alternatives to Kubernetes. Our customers expressed a clear need for this technology, and we decided to build it alongside them, with the level of technical excellence and sovereignty that defines our platform." — Quentin Adam, CEO of Clever Cloud

Learn more

The bill extends to major local authorities the data protection obligations introduced by the SREN Act, thereby reinforcing the “cloud-first” doctrine. It also provides for derogation mechanisms for projects already underway or in cases of technical difficulties or significant additional costs. These provisions underline the need for pragmatic implementation while maintaining the central objective of effectively securing sensitive public data.

As an engaged actor within the French cloud ecosystem, we welcome this initiative, which aims to involve all stakeholders in the public debate on securing digital public procurement.

The Law Committee will examine the bill on 25 February. At the initiative of Philippe Latombe, Member of Parliament for Vendée (1st constituency) and rapporteur of the text, a roundtable discussion organised on 20 February will bring together several cloud providers operating in France, including Clever Cloud, OVHcloud, Orange Business Services, Scaleway, Outscale, Cloud Temple and Numspot.

Cloud obligations extended at the territorial level

Article 31 of the Act of 21 May 2024 on securing and regulating the digital space (SREN Act) already governs the use of cloud services by the State and its operators when processing sensitive data. It requires that such data be effectively protected against any access by foreign public authorities not authorised under European Union law.

The bill inserts Article 31-1 to make this mechanism applicable to regions, départements, municipalities with more than 30,000 inhabitants, urban communities, metropolitan authorities, and other major inter-municipal public establishments.

This provision builds upon Article 31 of the SREN Act and aligns with broader European developments, notably the entry into application of the Data Act in September 2025. It aims in particular to limit public authorities’ exposure to the effects of extraterritorial legislation, thereby extending to the territorial level a mechanism previously centred on the State.

A collective responsibility

Clever Cloud welcomes the opportunity to contribute to the parliamentary work on this bill.

“This hearing reflects a crucial awareness: the protection of public data can no longer be considered solely at the level of central government. Local authorities hold and process significant volumes of sensitive data that are essential to the continuity of public services and the protection of citizens. Supporting them in adopting solutions that ensure genuine legal security is not optional — it is a collective responsibility,” said Quentin Adam, CEO of Clever Cloud.

Clever Cloud intends to actively contribute to the legislative debate and to support local authorities in implementing technically reliable and legally secure solutions.

This press kit brings together all the announcements made at ACCES 2025, Clever Cloud’s annual event held during the FOST. It illustrates the company’s ambition to provide a comprehensive, sovereign, high-performance European platform designed for the needs of modern organisations.

1. Beta launch of Clever Kubernetes Engine (CKE)

Clever Cloud announces the opening of Clever Kubernetes Engine (CKE), its managed Kubernetes offering designed to deliver a reliable, sovereign and simplified production experience. CKE is the result of several years of work on infrastructure automation and managed services. The aim is to make Kubernetes accessible to organisations without imposing the operational complexity involved in managing a traditional cluster.

Kubernetes has become an industry standard, but it can also introduce difficulties: control plane management, security, upgrades and monitoring. CKE takes on these responsibilities. The control plane is fully managed, upgrades are transparent, and nodes adjust automatically to demand. This approach allows teams to use Kubernetes as a tool without dealing with its operational constraints — in the Clever Cloud spirit.

CKE stands out thanks to Materia etcd, integrated as the underlying consistency and high-availability layer, replacing traditional etcd. This choice brings resilience, stability and predictable performance. CKE integrates natively with other Clever Cloud services: S3 object storage, databases, Pulsar, Network Groups, IAM, and more. Workloads can be deployed via kubectl, Helm or GitOps, while the infrastructure is operated by Clever Cloud.

With CKE, Clever Cloud strengthens its position as a credible European alternative to Big Tech Kubernetes platforms, in a sovereign, compliant and controlled environment. The offering is aligned with a shared 2026 roadmap.

2. New AI hosting and compute platform (H1 2026)

Clever Cloud announces a new AI platform developed with SpiNNcloud, available in the first half of 2026. This European neuromorphic infrastructure is designed to provide a high-performance, efficient and sovereign environment suitable for training, adaptation and inference of AI models.

SpiNNcloud technology already enables a significant reduction in the cost and energy consumption of AI workloads, with substantial gains expected for future architectures. Hosted and operated by Clever Cloud, the infrastructure guarantees a European framework independent from extra-European providers.

Offered through a flexible model, the platform will allow companies to use the capacity they need with no upfront investment. It integrates with the broader Clever Cloud ecosystem, providing a complete chain from data to model deployment in a coherent, controlled and transparent environment.

3. Materia: major updates for KV and launch of Materia TS (Tech Preview)

Materia, Clever Cloud’s serverless database product line, continues to evolve with significant improvements to Materia KV and the launch of Materia TS in tech preview.

Materia KV: enhancements

Materia KV gains stability, performance and an improved ability to handle substantial workloads, while retaining its serverless principles: strong consistency, high availability and automatic scaling. The new version also introduces KV Explorer, a tool within the Clever Cloud console for visualising, filtering and querying data via a dedicated terminal. These improvements strengthen KV’s use cases for microservices, operational data and distributed architectures.

Materia TS: tech preview launch

At the event, Clever Cloud will present Materia TS, the first engine in the range dedicated to time-series data. Built on technologies from the Warp 10 ecosystem, it is designed for observability, IoT, industrial environments, telemetry and continuous monitoring.

Materia TS enables ingestion, storage and analysis of massive volumes of time-series data thanks to an engine optimised for compression, structuring and time-based analytics. With Materia KV and TS, the Materia range becomes a comprehensive foundation covering several data models (SQL, KV, TS), fully integrated into Clever Cloud automation.

4. Strategic partnership with 2CRSI

Clever Cloud announces a strategic partnership with 2CRSI to develop hardware infrastructures that natively embed Clever Cloud technologies. Bringing together a European high-performance server manufacturer and a sovereign cloud provider, this collaboration aims to produce solutions designed for performance, efficiency and reliability.

The first systems resulting from this partnership will target critical environments — industry, telecoms, sensitive infrastructures — where security, traceability and governance are essential. This initiative extends Clever Cloud’s commitments to an independent and sustainable European infrastructure.

5. New Clever Cloud offering for Industry 4.0: unified Edge & Cloud platform

Clever Cloud introduces its offering dedicated to Industry 4.0, designed for industrial environments requiring security, continuity, low latency and controlled deployment processes. The offering combines on-premise, edge and cloud execution within a unified software framework based on Clever Cloud automation.

At its core, Clever Edge enables the deployment and maintenance of industrial applications close to equipment: production sites, embedded devices, virtualised environments or cloud environments. The platform is based on a Kubernetes distribution capable of running containers, VMs and system processes, with integrated management of networking, storage, updates, security, monitoring and logging.

The offering includes management of air-gapped environments — essential for sectors subject to strict regulatory requirements.

Designed for real-world Industry 4.0 use cases (logistics, industrial IoT, automation, distributed supervision), new customers are already using this offering. It targets manufacturing, logistics, industrial and sensitive sectors seeking resilience, autonomy and sovereignty.

6. Clever Cloud expands its infrastructure with two new data centres in Paris

Clever Cloud expands its infrastructure by opening two new points of presence in the Paris region, at ETIX Paris #3 in Vélizy and Telehouse TH3 in Magny-les-Hameaux, to support the company’s growth and the increasing demand for hosting capacity. First availability is expected in early 2026. With these two sites, Clever Cloud will operate five data centres in Île-de-France.

Clever Cloud selected ETIX for its ISO 27001, HDH and PCI DSS-certified infrastructure, suited to sensitive environments. As a key player in fully sovereign data centres, ETIX relies on a dense national footprint and an energy strategy based on a target PUE of 1.3, along with ISO 14001, ISO 50001 and ASHRAE certifications — aligned with Clever Cloud’s commitments to efficiency and sustainability.

“Our infrastructures are designed to combine high density, energy efficiency and reliability. This approach allows us to support the rise of cloud and artificial intelligence while controlling our environmental impact,” says Louis Blanchot, CEO of ETIX.

The Telehouse TH3 data centre, built on a former military site, provides a high level of availability (99.99% SLA), reinforced physical security and electrical capacities suited to scaling workloads. Already present at TH2, one of France’s main Internet hubs, Clever Cloud extends its connectivity and multi-site resilience with TH3. The site is ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 27001 and ISO 50001 certified.

7. Grist joins the Clever Cloud marketplace

Grist joins the Clever Cloud marketplace. This modern tool for manipulating and collaborating on tabular data allows teams to build internal applications, tracking dashboards and business workflows quickly. Hosted on Clever Cloud, Grist benefits from a sovereign environment and seamless integration with the platform’s other services.

8. Product updates: FerretDB, Pulsar General Availability & Network Groups

Clever Cloud announces three major product updates:

• FerretDB enhances the managed database offering with an open-source, MongoDB-compatible alternative.
• Apache Pulsar reaches General Availability, providing a mature engine for event-driven architectures and distributed systems.
• Network Groups introduce advanced network segmentation to isolate, organise and secure applications.

These developments strengthen Clever Cloud’s ability to serve as a complete foundation for modern applications requiring performance, security, cost control and strategic autonomy.

The announcement was made during the Franco-German summit “Summit on European Digital Sovereignty – Shaping Europe’s digital future. Together.” Both companies see this collaboration as a key lever to make artificial intelligence more accessible and truly sovereign in Europe.

They note that despite growing interest in AI, industrial adoption is still significantly hindered by computing costs. SpiNNcloud’s current systems already reduce certain costs by up to 17x. The next architecture, SpiNNext, is expected to push efficiency gains even further, with potential savings of up to 80x. A breakthrough that could reshape the dynamics of AI industrialization on the continent.

A Franco-German cooperation for a sovereign AI infrastructure

The two partners see their collaboration as a structuring component of a Franco-German  initiative dedicated to AI infrastructures. They emphasize that sustainable competition with global giants will only be possible by strengthening cooperation among European players. Their ambition goes beyond their own partnership: they aim to involve other innovative SMEs across the continent to form a network of expertise capable of delivering essential digital building blocks without external dependency.

Clever Cloud operates a European cloud platform for hosting, automation, databases, and orchestration. All technology is developed in-house and operated in Europe. The company employs around one hundred people and serves customers in more than 120 countries. 
SpiNNcloud, for its part, develops computing architectures inspired by the human brain, designed for high-performance computing and artificial intelligence applications. Its systems currently rely on the SpiNNaker2 architecture, while SpiNNext is already under development.

The cooperation has entered an operational phase. The first SpiNNcloud systems are being integrated into Clever Cloud’s infrastructure, and technical tests are underway. Two workstreams are being developed: leveraging the performance of the systems for intensive computing, and a shared “Token as a Service” layer, enabling companies to use AI services -language models or other algorithms - based on actual consumption, with significantly reduced costs and energy usage. The teams have aligned their roadmap around integration, security, and operations.

By relying on European technologies-both hardware and software-the two companies aim to contribute to the emergence of a truly independent AI infrastructure. Following the summit, they plan to continue discussions with French, German, and European authorities to share insights on infrastructures, energy efficiency, and digital sovereignty. The event held between President Emmanuel Macron and Chancellor Friedrich Merz also provided a platform for extensive exchanges with the attending delegations.

Quentin Adam, CEO of Clever Cloud, States: “We want a Europe that develops its own technologies and takes control of its digital future. With SpiNNcloud, we demonstrate that European industry not only has the expertise but also the determination to address the major challenges of AI: costs, energy consumption, sovereignty. This collaboration shows that a cooperating Europe can design high-performance, efficient, and truly independent infrastructures.”

Hector Gonzalez, CEO of SpiNNcloud, adds: “With Clever Cloud, we found an ideal partner to bring the unique energy efficiency of our brain-inspired systems to industrial use cases. This Franco-German cooperation proves that Europe has the technological building blocks needed to build competitive and sovereign solutions.”

About SpiNNcloud

SpiNNcloud is reinventing AI infrastructure through a brain-inspired computing architecture designed to drastically reduce energy consumption while maintaining high performance. Its event-based approach, in which computations occur only when needed, opens up new margins of efficiency. The company provides complete systems to research centers and enterprises worldwide.

Want to learn more about this project?

Feel free to contact us.

Contact us

A new region and a new market for Clever Cloud

This is the first step in a smart  partnership with IONOS:

For Clever Cloud, it represents a full operational entry into the UK market, with local hosting, improved latency, regulatory compliance, and closer proximity to customers.

IONOS now hosts Clever Cloud's application delivery solution on its infrastructure. This ensures the highest security standards and DUAA compliance, as well as maximum data control, scalability and reliability.

Concrete benefits for developers and organizations
By combining IONOS’s infrastructure strength with Clever Cloud’s developer-centric platform, the partnership delivers a unique European “full stack” solution.

• For developers: faster deployments, frictionless scaling, and a simplified experience that lets them focus on building applications instead of managing infrastructure.
• For organizations: the ability to innovate quickly while maintaining sovereignty over their data, with guaranteed compliance, performance, and trusted European hosting.
  Together, Clever Cloud and IONOS provide speed, simplicity, and security without compromise.

A shared vision for an independent European digital ecosystem

Clever Cloud shares the same ambitions as IONOS: to build a strong, resilient, and independent European digital ecosystem. Together, they champion a vision of cloud infrastructure based on transparency, interoperability, regulatory compliance, and control over the technological value chain.

About Clever Cloud

Founded in 2010, Clever Cloud is a French technology company specializing in the automation of application deployment and operations. Its PaaS platform enables developers to focus on their code while Clever Cloud handles scalability, security, monitoring, and compliance. The company is ISO 27001:2022 and HDS certified.

About IONOS

IONOS is the leading digitalization partner and trusted cloud enabler for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The company serves over 6.4 million customers and has a presence in 18 markets across Europe and North America, with its services being accessible worldwide. Its web presence and productivity portfolio caters to all digitalisation needs, providing domains, web hosting and website builders with AI capabilities, as well as eCommerce and online marketing tools. The company also offers cloud solutions for businesses looking to move their operations to the cloud as they expand and develop.

An unprecedented initiative led by Gigalis

Created in 2000 by the Pays de la Loire Regional Council, Gigalis has established itself as a key player in public digital services. Transformed into a Public Interest Group (GIP) in January 2025, it now supports regional authorities and institutions with sovereign services in connectivity, cybersecurity, cloud, and the pooling of digital procurement. It is within this dynamic that, on September 1st, the Fabrique IA Territoriale was officially launched — a unique initiative in France bringing together public actors and private companies to address the challenges of artificial intelligence and open source.

Three complementary lots to structure the AI ecosystem

The framework agreement designed by Gigalis has been divided into three lots, covering the entire lifecycle of AI projects.

1. The first focuses on consulting and raising awareness around artificial intelligence, and was awarded to a group of national and regional players including Linagora, Onepoint, Pyxis support, Synchrone et Wavestone.
2. The second, dedicated to community integration, brings together Atos, DRI, Metapolis, Beewant, Reel IT, Cross Data, PARTHEMA, DATA INCEPTIO.AI et Valeuriad.
3. Finally, the third lot, centered on infrastructure, hosting, deployment, and operations using open source technologies, was awarded to Clever Cloud, Linagora, DRI, Siium et Reel IT.

This organization ensures strong complementarity and makes it possible to provide public sector actors with a coherent, sovereign, and tailored offering that fully meets their needs.

Clever Cloud’s expertise for Lot 3

Clever Cloud’s participation in the Fabrique IA Territoriale is fully aligned with our mission: providing a European, secure cloud that frees public organizations from technical constraints. In practice, our approach relies on proven open source technologies, integrated into an automated infrastructure to ensure interoperability, performance, and security. At the same time, we guarantee high availability, continuous monitoring, and measurable commitments through transparent quality indicators.

Beyond the technical aspects, our contribution also consists in transferring knowledge to gradually make beneficiaries autonomous. This transfer of expertise lies at the heart of our approach: supporting, securing, and sustaining digital projects without creating dependency on external providers.

A commitment to digital sovereignty in the region

The Fabrique IA Territoriale is more than just a framework agreement: it embodies a collective vision of trusted digital services, designed for local territories. By joining this initiative, Clever Cloud strengthens its commitment to offering a credible European alternative to major international providers. This approach enables local authorities to benefit from modern, resilient infrastructures while supporting the regional digital ecosystem.

For Clever Cloud, this participation illustrates the convergence between our values and those promoted by Gigalis: sovereignty, cooperation, and sustainability. We believe that an ethical and responsible digital environment must be built on open, secure, and accessible solutions for all public sector actors.

Conclusion and outlook

Our role within the Fabrique IA Territoriale reaffirms our determination to support the digital transformation of public services, giving them the means to manage their projects with efficiency and transparency. Alongside committed partners, we put automation, security, and sovereignty at the service of collective intelligence and local innovation.

To learn more about how Clever Cloud can support your public sector or territorial projects:

Contact us

This strategic report evaluates global vendors capable of delivering mature cloud-native platforms, enabling product teams to deploy and operate modern applications and AI agents at scale.

A high-performance, open platform built for developers

Clever Cloud offers a cloud-native application platform that natively supports over 15 programming environments (JavaScript, PHP, .NET, Java, Python, Rust, etc.), as well as auto-scaling containers, integrated CI/CD workflows, instant rollbacks, detailed observability, and unified monitoring.

The platform also includes a managed services marketplace — databases, message queues, storage, identity management, AI services — with native support for hybrid deployment scenarios. Clever Cloud places developer experience and operational automation at the core of its value proposition.

“This mention in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant reflects the technical strength of our platform, our commitment to open source, and our ambition to build a credible European alternative to hyperscalers,”said Quentin Adam, CEO of Clever Cloud.

Recognition in a fast-moving market

Although Clever Cloud does not yet meet the revenue thresholds required for full quadrant inclusion, Gartner acknowledged its advanced technical capabilities, clear product vision, and growing impact in the European sovereign cloud ecosystem.

This recognition supports Clever Cloud’s broader growth strategy, including international expansion to deliver local cloud infrastructure in West and North Africa and Kazakhstan, the rollout of numerous new services, the development of Clever AI, and the announcement of a forthcoming managed Kubernetes offering.

Want to find out more? Watch our video demonstration or contact us!

This collaboration paves the way for European public institutions and private organizations to access Grist’s powerful spreadsheet-database, fully hosted on Clever Cloud’s compliance-ready infrastructure. The partnership directly addresses regulatory needs around compliance with European regulation, EU digital sovereignty, and France’s HDS and SecNumCloud standards. Notably, France’s Direction Interministérielle du Numérique (DINUM) already uses and recommends Grist internally and across public agencies, positioning it as a trusted open-source replacement for spreadsheets that adds the robust relational structure of databases.

Through this alliance, Clever Cloud becomes the preferred European hosting partner for Grist. Clients will benefit from:

• Direct deployment of dedicated Grist instances through a Clever Cloud Marketplace Grist add-on, enabling a frictionless deployment of secure and managed services.
• Community and Enterprise versions of Grist, satisfying the needs of all types of organizations of any size.
• Choice of hosting models: public cloud, on-premise, or even air-gapped environments: all operated on Clever Cloud’s sovereign cloud.
• Certified compliance, including support for France’s HDS certification and SecNumCloud-qualified environments.
• Premium support options and access to Clever Cloud’s network of Managed Service Providers (MSPs).

Building Sustainable Open Source Through Technical and Business Synergy

This partnership is rooted in a shared commitment to the long-term sustainability of open source software and the promotion of business models that helps the sustainability of open source private stakeholders. Grist Labs and Clever Cloud are combining their strengths to deliver a robust, scalable deployment model for Grist, one that balances technical excellence with commercial viability.

Clever Cloud is not simply contributing to the ecosystem : it has made the deliberate decision to actively explore and implement models that help fund and sustain open source maintenance and innovation. This includes aligning infrastructure services with open standards, fostering a community of trusted partners, and supporting business models that ensure maintainers and contributors can thrive.
Commercially, the collaboration combines license resale and revenue-sharing mechanisms, creating a sustainable economic model that supports open source adoption at scale across both public and private sectors.

Joint Presence at VivaTech

To mark the launch of this partnership, Clever Cloud will showcase Grist running on SecNumCloud-qualified infrastructure at VivaTech, Europe’s premier startup and technology event. The announcement will include live product demonstrations, highlighting the platform’s capabilities and commitment to secure, sovereign cloud deployment.

- Wednesday 11th June: 📍Booth E59, Région Pays de la Loire - Hall 1
- Wednesday and Thursday 11 and 12 June: 📍Booth D33, Business France - Hall 1
- Friday 13th June:📍Booth H57, Mission French Tech - Hall 1


“This partnership is about enabling European organizations to regain control over their digital operations and data, while benefiting from best-in-class technology,” said Quentin Adam, CEO of Clever Cloud.
“Together with Clever Cloud, we are making it easier than ever for European customers to deploy and scale Grist securely and compliantly,” added Anais Concepcion, Co-CEO of Grist Labs.



About Grist
Grist Labs is the team behind Grist, an open-source spreadsheet-database built for business teams to securely collaborate, structure their data, and build custom tools, without giving up control.

The agreement was signed at the France-Kazakhstan Investment Forum, held on 28 May in Astana ahead of the Astana International Forum.

This partnership marks a major step forward for Kazakhstan's digital sovereignty: it will enable the deployment of the country's first sovereign PaaS, hosted directly on QazCloud's local infrastructure. Thanks to this collaboration, Kazakh businesses will benefit from high-performance, secure cloud solutions that meet the highest international standards.

In addition to digital sovereignty, this alliance paves the way for strategic developments in the field of artificial intelligence. Clever Cloud and QazCloud will be co-building R&D centres in Kazakhstan, veritable laboratories of excellence dedicated to AI. The aim of these initiatives is to support Kazakhstan's rise as an industrial powerhouse by drawing on the quality of its training and the presence of a large number of expert engineers, particularly in the fields of mathematics and artificial intelligence.

Quentin Adam, CEO of Clever Cloud, comments: 'We are extremely proud to sign this partnership with QazCloud, which goes far beyond a simple technological deployment. We were impressed by the quality of the schools and the level of excellence of mathematics teaching in Kazakhstan, as well as by the presence of many brilliant engineers who are already working on AI. Together, we want to co-build R&D laboratories dedicated to AI, and create new opportunities for AI at an industrial level. It's a partnership based on trust, sovereignty and the desire to build a powerful and sustainable local ecosystem.'

Clever Cloud would particularly like to thank:

• His Excellency Sylvain Guiaugue, Ambassador of France to Kazakhstan;
• The teams of the Economic Department of the French Embassy in Kazakhstan;
• MEDEF International for their support and guidance in bringing this structuring partnership to fruition.

A lucid assessment: Europe has delegated its critical infrastructures for too long

I am delighted to see President Macron expressing himself so clearly and convincingly on the need for European digital sovereignty. I particularly welcome his clear-sightedness in acknowledging that ‘I think we have made a very serious mistake in not having a truly European cloud. And what's more, we need to get back to the task’. This realisation at the highest level of government sends out a strong signal to all players in the European digital sector. However, more than getting back to the task, it is the European vision of what a cloud is that needs to be reviewed. If it were just a question of infrastructure, the cloud giants would be AOL and Verizon. But today, the hyperscalers are Microsoft, Google and Amazon, companies where software is at the centre. The Americans have understood this, and it's vital that Europe does too: the cloud isn't just about servers, it's also, and above all, about software.

The President also rightly pointed out that ‘it was so comfortable to be hand in glove with the Americans’, but that ‘we cannot depend on a few American companies to have a real cloud. Because this is also in the general European interest. It's a necessity.’ His phrase ‘there is no such thing as happy vassalage’ must become our leitmotiv in the construction of a technologically independent and sovereign Europe.

This declaration is perfectly in line with the signing of the contract for the ‘software and trusted digital solutions’ sector, adopted by Philippe Baptiste, Marc Ferracci, Clara Chappaz and Michel Paulin, whose objectives are to promote the development of sovereign digital infrastructures, to strengthen training in trusted digital technologies, and to create value and encourage innovation on a French scale.

The cloud war is not lost, it's just beginning

Contrary to what many people are saying today, the cloud war is not over for Europe. It has only just begun, and President Macron's statement is a powerful reminder of this. It's true that the American giants have taken a considerable lead, but the history of technology shows us that nothing can ever be taken for granted.

It's crucial to add one essential nuance: European skills, technologies and cloud solutions already exist. It's not a question of rebuilding everything from scratch, but rather of making better use of it, providing better support and better coordination. Solid, innovative and committed players are already working every day to offer a credible alternative to non-European solutions.
The new challenges of data sovereignty, cybersecurity and strategic autonomy are opening up a new phase in this technological battle. Europe has all the cards in its hand - talent, infrastructure, software, markets - to build a credible and sovereign alternative, provided we believe in it collectively and give ourselves the means to do so.

An action plan to turn this ambition into reality

President Macron said: ‘This is a strategic awakening. We must therefore regain this strategic autonomy, which is essential, everywhere, in every segment of our research and industry.’

To turn this vision into reality, it is essential to benefit from :

Clever Cloud already committed to building a sovereign European cloud

At Clever Cloud, we haven't just been waiting for this strategic awakening, we've been committed to being the architects of it for several years, along with many members of the ecosystem. We are actively contributing to numerous European collaborative initiatives such as CollabNext and Hyper Open X. We are also working on the emergence of European software and hardware solutions through recent calls for projects that we have launched.

The Sorbonne appeal must become a binding European agenda

This speech must not simply be another moment of communication. It must inaugurate a decade of coordinated action to ensure that our research, our data and our innovation are hosted, processed and governed in Europe. Not in Seattle, not in Palo Alto, not in Shanghai. In AI, in the cloud, in code archiving, Europe must be a player, not a spectator. It must fund its own laboratories of excellence, its start-ups, its supercomputers, and above all its digital commons.

France has everything it takes to play a leading role in this European dynamic. The time has come to move from words to deeds, by aligning our public policies with this strong ambition expressed by the President of the Republic.
Many of us are ready to play our full part in this fight. But Europe must finally take action.

Quentin Adam, CEO – Clever Cloud