Airbus is migrating its most critical applications for sensitive workloads from AWS to French cloud provider Scaleway's under a drive to increase digital sovereignty. As exclusively revealed by The Register in December, the European-based aerospace manufacturer, said it needed to guarantee the data remained “under European control" and was launching a tender at the start of 2026. Catherine Jestin, head of digital at Airbus, told us on Thursday: "The selection of Scaleway is a combination of a very strong technical answer and a very strong commercial offer making it competitive compared to hyperscalers' public cloud offerings. In addition, Scaleway is committed to involving Airbus in the definition of its future product roadmap." "The objective is to host Airbus's most critical applications (those required for the Minimum Viable Company). This represents 900 applications and we will start with 70 of them today hosted on AWS." Applications being sent to Scaleway include ERP, manufacturing execution systems, CRM, and product lifecycle management. Finding a cloud provider to host its most sensitive applications for defense and industrial workloads was not a certainty when the process began, Airbus told us last year, because European cloud providers do not have the scale of their US rivals. Jestin said Airbus will continue to work with AWS. Skywise, a platform that aggregates and analyzes aviation data, and Case Management Assistant for customers' technical queries will continue to be hosted by AWS. In a statement, she said: “By integrating a trusted, high performance, cloud environment that keeps our critical data assets shielded from foreign extraterritorial laws, we are ensuring that our digital infrastructure keeps pace with our aerospace innovation, while maintaining control and resilience of our industrial operations.” Since President Donald Trump came to power for a second term, his antagonistic approach to allies - some of them now former allies - has created economic and geopolitical tensions between the US and Europe. This has heightened concern about the US Cloud Act, which allows the American government to request data held in overseas datacenters owned by US businesses, and only served to reinforce calls for digital sovereignty. Reacting to the movement in Europe, AWS, Microsoft and Google have all worked to convince customers they can provide digitally sovereign services, although a Microsoft exec previously admitted in a French court - under oath - that he could not guarantee digital sovereignty. Airbus continues to work with both Microsoft and Google’s productivity suites though this latest move with Scaleway exemplifies the broader pattern across the trading bloc: to become more self sufficient and less reliant on US big tech. Jestin told us the aerospace corp will also still use US providers, including Salesforce, Coupa and Workday. "We do not intend to move away from all non European solutions; we balance our choices based on the criticality of the data. AWS declined to comment. ®
