Iliad’s Scaleway ramps up virtual services globally 

Service provider expands its cloud services globally, launching virtual private servers in 65 cities, and introduces an AI-focused “GPU Cluster On Demand” service

French cloud computing and web hosting company Scaleway, a subsidiary of the Groupe Iliad, has set its sights on becoming a leader in European cloud services. It has expanded its virtual private server (VPS) offering to cover 65 cities in 52 countries across six continents – up from three countries.

The company has also announced the availability of 1,000 new Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs, interconnected by Nvidia’s latest networking platform, Spectrum-X, to create a new “GPU Cluster On Demand” offering.  

Dedibox VPS gives companies full flexibility to deploy virtual infrastructure wherever their users are. It is ideal for services and applications that require geographic proximity, such as VPNs, CDNs and edge computing. “Rolling out our Dedibox VPS offering on a global scale is a real milestone for Scaleway, as it means we can now partner with our European customers in their international expansion,” said Scaleway CEO Damien Lucas.  

Since announcing, last September, that it had acquired an Nvidia DGX SuperPOD, Scaleway has been increasing the AI computing power available to its customers by regularly investing in many Nvidia GPUs. Using its partnership with Nvidia and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Scaleway is launching “GPU Cluster On Demand”. With this solution, Scaleway’s customers will be able to reserve the size of computing clusters they want, from a few GPUs to several thousand, for as long as they want – from a few days to several years – for AI use cases. 

Training cluster 

Scaleway has also just signed a deal to provide a large training cluster of Nvidia H100 GPUs to the “H” company, a stealth startup founded in Paris. Steered by CEO Charles Kantor, the “H” company brings together a founding team of former Google DeepMind leaders. The Paris-based company aims to develop foundational action models, and multi-agent models, whereby numerous AI systems interact with one another, leading to new close-to-AGI capabilities, according to the company. 

“Having already enabled European leaders like Mistral and Kyutai to train their state-of-the-art models on the continent’s most powerful cloud AI cluster, we’re excited to empower the foundational work of “H”, the sector’s next startup to watch,” said Lucas. 

“We’re delighted to be launching the next stage of AI, in France, benefiting from the strength of Scaleway’s European cloud AI, with the support of the Iliad Group. Our partners’ values are perfectly aligned with those of “H”, giving us incredible launch conditions for our essential new mission”, said Charles Kantor, co-founder and CEO of the “H” company. 

Paris home data centre 

Like the vast majority of the GPUs that Scaleway has purchased over recent months, the additional GPUs will be installed at the heart of the Iliad Group’s DC5 data centre located in the Greater Paris region. With its adiabatic cooling system, Iliad claims the data centre is one of the most efficient in Europe in terms of electricity and water consumption – it uses 30%-40% less electricity and is over twice as water-efficient as conventional data centres, according to the company.