Airbus‑Scaleway sovereign cloud partnership expands

In mid‑July 2026 Airbus announced a multi‑year agreement with French cloud provider Scaleway to host sensitive industrial and defence applications, including AI tools from the startup Mistral. The contract, valued at over €50 million for up to ten years, targets migration of about 70 critical workloads by the end of 2028, with a longer‑term goal of moving up to 900 applications over the next five to six years. Airbus will retain AWS for its Skywise aviation data platform and continue using Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and Workday for other services.

On 24 July 2026 Airbus detailed the first phase of the migration, moving roughly 70 critical applications—aircraft design tools, production systems, ERP and product‑lifecycle management—from Amazon Web Services to Scaleway. Executives emphasized that the move keeps data under EU jurisdiction and shields it from U.S. extraterritorial laws such as the Cloud Act. The tender that selected Scaleway was scored on technical capability, operational excellence and, importantly, legal safeguards against foreign legislation.

A follow‑up announcement on 27 July 2026 confirmed the 70‑application shift and added that Airbus selected SAP’s "RISE with SAP" solution, built on a sovereign‑cloud model, to modernise the business processes of more than 100,000 employees. The SAP deployment will cover ERP, MES, CRM and PLM systems and aligns with Airbus’s broader European digital‑sovereignty strategy, including participation in ESTIA and the European Tech Creators coalition. At the same time, Airbus is bolstering its cybersecurity portfolio through the acquisitions of Ultra Cyber Ltd and Quarkslab.

The partnership is presented as a milestone in Airbus’s strategy to protect critical data within EU legal frameworks while maintaining collaborations with other major cloud providers for non‑critical workloads.