The aerospace group picked Scaleway, owned by France's iliad Group, after a competitive tender worth more than €50 million over up to 10 years. The decision was driven by a single overriding concern: keeping sensitive data beyond the reach of foreign extraterritorial laws, particularly the US CLOUD Act, which allows American authorities to demand data held by US firms even in overseas data centres.
Airbus's digital chief Catherine Jestin said the setup "keeps our critical data assets shielded from foreign extraterritorial laws." The company judged bidders on three criteria: technical strength, operational resilience, and legal safeguards against non-European legislation. Scaleway won by offering a competitive price alongside a strong technical answer that matched the hyperscalers.
This is not a clean break from US big tech. Airbus will keep AWS for its Skywise aviation-data platform and a customer-support tool. It continues to run Microsoft and Google productivity suites, plus Salesforce, Coupa and Workday. The migration covers the 70 most critical applications now on AWS, part of a broader set of about 900 applications needed to keep Airbus running as a "minimum viable company."
Three knowledge points stand out. First, the US CLOUD Act is the legal driver — it gives US authorities a legal basis to access data held by American companies even when stored in foreign data centres, and a Microsoft executive told a French court under oath that the company could not guarantee data sovereignty. Second, tensions between the US and Europe have sharpened under a second Trump administration, accelerating calls for digital sovereignty across European industries. Third, Scaleway's win demonstrates that European cloud providers can now compete on technical capability and price with the American hyperscalers for enterprise workloads, not just for small-business customers.