Airbus is moving its most critical apps off AWS to a French cloud

Airbus is pulling some of its most sensitive systems off Amazon Web Services and onto a European cloud. The aerospace group has picked French provider Scaleway to host them, Scaleway said.

The move covers the applications Airbus needs to keep running as a “minimum viable company.” That is about 900 apps, starting with 70 now on AWS, The Register reported.

What is moving, and why

The systems heading to Scaleway include Airbus’s ERP, manufacturing, CRM and product-lifecycle software. They span aircraft design, engineering, manufacturing and enterprise operations.

The goal is to keep that data under European control. The setup “keeps our critical data assets shielded from foreign extraterritorial laws,” said Catherine Jestin, Airbus’s digital chief. Scaleway, owned by France’s iliad Group, won a competitive tender worth more than €50 million over up to 10 years, Techzine reported.

Airbus judged bidders on three fronts: technical strength, operational resilience, and legal safeguards against non-European laws. Jestin said Scaleway offered a strong technical answer at a price that was competitive with the hyperscalers.

The sovereignty backdrop

The concern driving all this is the US CLOUD Act. It lets American authorities request data held by US firms, even in overseas data centres. Last year a Microsoft executive told a French court, under oath, that the company could not guarantee data sovereignty.

Tensions between the US and Europe have sharpened under a second Trump administration, hardening calls for digital sovereignty. AWS, Microsoft and Google have all launched “sovereign” offerings to reassure European customers.

Not a clean break

This is not Airbus abandoning US big tech. It will keep AWS for its Skywise aviation-data platform and a customer-support tool. It also still runs Microsoft and Google productivity suites, plus 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,” Jestin said. AWS declined to comment.

The deal is a marquee win for Europe’s sovereign cloud ambitions. It signals a wider European push to lean less on American infrastructure. Scaleway chief Damien Lucas called it proof that Europe can deliver sovereign cloud “at the highest international standards.”