Scaleway

Scaleway (formerly Online SAS or Online.net)[1] is a French cloud computing and web hosting company[2], founded by Xavier Niel in 1999 and a majority owned subsidiary of the Iliad group. The company provides physical dedicated servers and cloud computing architectures.

As of 2015, Scaleway is the second largest hosting company in France.[3]

In 1999, Online started its activities in web hosting and domain name registration services[4][5]

In August 2002, the domain name registrar BookMyName was bought by Iliad from its competitor LDCom.[6]

In May 2006, rental of dedicated servers through the Dedibox brand was launched.

In December 2008, Iliad bought Alice ADSL: They also took over construction and operation of Datacenters, launched in 1999 by ISDnet, bought by Cable & Wireless in January 2000[7] acquired by Tiscali France in June 2003[8] and finally renamed as Iliad Datacenter.

In April 2010, Online merges with Dedibox, another subsidiary of Iliad,[9] bringing together different hosting activities under a single brand.

In 2012, the company has opened its third datacenter of 11800 m² in Vitry-sur-Seine[10] after 11 months of construction works. The site received the first Tier-III certification in France by Uptime Institute in January 2014.

Since 2012, the company has published its datacenters' PUE in real time on pue.online.net.[11]

In 2013, Online launched labs.online.net in preview. An infrastructure as a service offer, based on dedicated hardware and without virtualization,[12] based on ARM CPUs.[13] The hardware is made in a factory near Laval in France.

In April 2015 the service left its beta status and has been renamed as Scaleway.[14] Online added servers with x86_64 based CPUs in March 2016.[15]

Entrepreneur Yann Lechelle [fr] joined as CEO in early 2020,[16] but left in December 2022.[17]

In November 2023, Iliad launched Kyutai in France, an independent, non-profit artificial intelligence research laboratory operating on an open-source and open-science basis, funded with 300 million Euro.[18][19]

According to Euractiv, the European Commission has been in talks for several weeks about European cloud providers as alternatives to Microsoft, including Scaleway.[20] In April 2026, the European Commission selected Scaleway as one of four providers under its Cloud III Dynamic Purchasing System, a €180 million framework for EU institutions to procure sovereign cloud and AI services over up to six years.[21][22]

In July 2026, Airbus signed a multi-year agreement with Scaleway to host sensitive industrial and defence applications, including systems for aircraft design, engineering, manufacturing and corporate operations.[23] Scaleway also signed partnerships with Swedish operator Tele2 to launch a sovereign cloud and AI offering in Sweden, and with France Télévisions to host and process content-related data.[24][25]

Scaleway owns and operates several data centers located in Île-de-France.[26][27]

• DC2, with a size of 4,500 m² in Vitry-sur-Seine, within the Val-de-Marne. The building has been constructed in 1989 by NMPP (Presstalis), then successively taken over by ISDNet, Cable & Wireless, Tiscali, then Telecom Italia, and is therefore an indirect product of the acquisition of Alice ADSL by Iliad.
• DC3, with a size of 11,800 m² in the same city is divided into several private spaces. It was built in 2012 by the group.[28] It has reached its capacity in early 2016 and works have been planned to extend its capacity by 2,300 m2.[29]
• DC4, with a size of 8,000 m² on six floors in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, housed in the former anti-atomic fallout shelter of the "Laboratoire central des ponts et chaussées". It was built between 1936 and 1939 by architect Gabriel Héraud,[30] the building was acquired by Iliad in 2011.[31] The main part of the fallout shelter is being used for the C14 offer.[32]
• DC5, with a size of 32,000 m² on four floors at Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône. It is the result of the acquisition of an old mail sorting center of La Poste,[33] and will handle the growth from 2017-2025 of the hoster.[29]

In the past the company operated also:

• DC1, with a size of 6300 m² in Bezons,[34] which also hosts the network head of Free.[35] Built in 2001 by the American company Exodus Communications[36][37] then taken back by Spherion,[38] after the bankruptcy of the company. It is leased to Iliad on a long-term contract since 2003[39][40] This site does not host any activities of Online since 2013.[41]

• Official website