Every year, European companies pay tens of billions of euros to American players for their Cloud software and services: a dependency now documented by several parliamentary reports, which call for a reconquest of European digital sovereignty.
But a dynamic of sovereignty cannot be decreed by a report: it is built through example, and through concrete industrial capabilities. This is precisely the ambition carried by the European ÆTHER consortium, in which OUTSCALE, the Cloud and AI brand of Dassault Systèmes, takes part.
What Is the ÆTHER consortium?
ÆTHER brings together complementary European players in energy, construction, high-performance computing, semiconductors, Cloud, and AI: 2CRSi, SiPearl, Axelera AI, Viridien, ÉS, Socomec, Haffner Energy, Equans, Demathieu Bard, Nhood, and Projex Ingénierie, alongside OUTSCALE.
The consortium pursues a clear ambition: to demonstrate that Europe possesses all the expertise required to design, build, power, operate, and scale AI infrastructure.
The consortium has announced its application for the European Commission’s “AI Gigafactory” call for proposals, launched as part of the EU’s digital and industrial sovereignty strategy. The project targets two sites in the Strasbourg region, FR-SXB1 and FR-SXB2, currently in advanced negotiations with the long-term ambition of reaching a total electrical capacity of more than 400 MW.
“Industrial AI will only deliver on its promise if Europe builds infrastructure equal to its ambitions”, Florence Verzelen, Executive Vice President EMEA, Dassault Systèmes
OUTSCALE's role: turning compute into sovereign, secure, and industrialized Cloud and AI services
Concretely, OUTSCALE brings to ÆTHER its expertise as a sovereign Cloud and AI operator: the ability to turn large-scale compute power into secure, governed, and industrialized services for businesses, institutions, and research organizations.
“As the Cloud and AI foundation of Dassault Systèmes, OUTSCALE brings to ÆTHER unique expertise at the intersection of sovereign cloud, high-performance computing, and mission-critical industrial applications. Our ambition is to enable businesses, public institutions, and research organizations to develop and operate their AI models in high-performance, secure, and sovereign environments that protect data, know-how, and intellectual property. With ÆTHER, Europe is equipping itself with a strategic industrial capability to design, host, and operate AI at scale”, Arnaud Bertrand, Chief Technology Officer, OUTSCALE, and Senior Vice President, Cloud R&D, Dassault Systèmes.
A capability that reinforces an already established strategy
Joining ÆTHER doesn’t start from scratch: it reinforces the AI Factories strategy that Dassault Systèmes has entrusted to OUTSCALE, which already aims to provide the Cloud, orchestration, and execution capacities needed to train, infer, and operate AI models at scale in critical environments. ÆTHER brings an additional European capability to this trajectory, aligned with the needs for sovereignty, performance, and scale in industrial AI.
All the pieces already exist: now they need to be connected
Europe today has every piece in the AI value chain: energy, Cloud, high-performance computing, semiconductors, industrial software, and research. The value of the ÆTHER consortium, like that of any AI Gigafactory project, will be measured by its ability to connect these links to serve concrete use cases: training models, adapting them, operating them, securing them, governing them, and integrating them into organizations’ business processes.
This is the ambition that OUTSCALE, Dassault Systèmes, and all the partners of the ÆTHER consortium carry forward together.
