France has chosen domestic cloud provider Scaleway, a subsidiary of Iliad, to host the country’s Health Data Hub, replacing Microsoft Azure in a long‑contested arrangement, Scaleway said on Thursday.
The decision fits into a broader shift as Europe seeks cloud sovereignty independent of U.S.-based Big Tech companies.
In Germany, the state of Schleswig‑Holstein is migrating 30,000 government workstations away from Microsoft products, while Denmark’s digital affairs ministry is switching to open‑source LibreOffice following similar moves by the cities of Copenhagen and Aarhus. The contract also adds to the French cloud provider’s growing momentum in Europe. Earlier in April, the European Commission awarded a €180 million ($210 million) cloud tender to Scaleway, Post Telecom, OVHcloud and STACKIT.
Scaleway, which was evaluated against more than 350 technical criteria, will be responsible for securing health records covering tens of millions of French citizens. The new platform is expected to be operational between late 2026 and early 2027.
In 2019, the French government selected Microsoft Azure to host health data without holding a competitive tender, a decision that drew prolonged legal and political scrutiny.
France’s data protection watchdog refused to approve a permanent transfer of the full dataset, citing risks linked to the extraterritorial reach of U.S. laws. France’s national cybersecurity agency later established its SecNumCloud certification framework, imposing stringent requirements for critical data and effectively excluding U.S. providers and their European subsidiaries by ruling out access through non‑European legislation.
A follow‑up law passed in 2024 mandates that sensitive data be hosted on infrastructure guaranteed to be sovereign.
Last year, under oath before a French Senate inquiry commission, Microsoft’s legal director acknowledged that the company could not oppose a U.S. injunction targeting French citizens’ data, even if that data was hosted in France.