{"id":16010,"date":"2026-07-29T10:22:06","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T08:22:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.outscale.com\/?p=16010"},"modified":"2026-07-29T10:22:06","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T08:22:06","slug":"aether-consortium-building-europes-industrial-capability-for-ai-at-scale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.outscale.com\/en\/aether-consortium-building-europes-industrial-capability-for-ai-at-scale\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00c6THER Consortium: Building Europe’s Industrial Capability for AI at Scale"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u00c6THER consortium, in which OUTSCALE, the Cloud and AI brand of Dassault Syst\u00e8mes, takes part.<\/span><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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What Is the \u00c6THER consortium?<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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\u00c6THER brings together complementary European players in energy, construction, high-performance computing, semiconductors, Cloud, and AI: 2CRSi, SiPearl, Axelera AI, Viridien, \u00c9S, Socomec, Haffner Energy, Equans, Demathieu Bard, Nhood, and Projex Ing\u00e9nierie, alongside OUTSCALE.<\/span><\/p>\n

The consortium pursues a clear ambition: to demonstrate that Europe possesses all the expertise required to design, build, power, operate, and scale AI infrastructure.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Industrial AI will only deliver on its promise if Europe builds infrastructure equal to its ambitions”, Florence Verzelen, Executive Vice President EMEA, Dassault Syst\u00e8mes<\/span><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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OUTSCALE's role: turning compute into sovereign, secure, and industrialized Cloud and AI services<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Concretely, OUTSCALE brings to \u00c6THER 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

“As the Cloud and AI foundation of Dassault Syst\u00e8mes, OUTSCALE brings to \u00c6THER 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 \u00c6THER, 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 Syst\u00e8mes.<\/span><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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A capability that reinforces an already established strategy<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Joining \u00c6THER doesn’t start from scratch: it reinforces the AI Factories strategy that Dassault Syst\u00e8mes 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. \u00c6THER brings an additional European capability to this trajectory, aligned with the needs for sovereignty, performance, and scale in industrial AI.<\/span><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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All the pieces already exist: now they need to be connected<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Europe today has every piece in the AI value chain: energy, Cloud, high-performance computing, semiconductors, industrial software, and research. The value of the \u00c6THER 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is the ambition that OUTSCALE, Dassault Syst\u00e8mes, and all the partners of the \u00c6THER consortium carry forward together.<\/span><\/p>\n

View the press release<\/a>.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every year, European companies pay tens of billions of euros to American players for their Cloud…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16002,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[395,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-sovereignty"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t