OVHcloud confirms its outlook as public cloud growth accelerates past 20%

Europe’s largest cloud company posted faster third-quarter growth and reaffirmed full-year guidance, with its public cloud segment back above 20%.

OVHcloud, the Roubaix-based group that France keeps nominating as Europe’s answer to the American hyperscalers, reported faster revenue growth in its fiscal third quarter on Thursday and reaffirmed its full-year guidance, helped by a public cloud business that has climbed back above 20% expansion.

Revenue for the three months to the end of May came in at €289.6 million, up 6.9% on a like-for-like basis and 6.5% as reported, according to the company’s results release.

That is a clear sequential pick-up from the 5.1% organic growth recorded in the second quarter, and it pushed nine-month revenue to €844.9 million, up 6.0%.

The acceleration was concentrated in one segment. Public Cloud, which accounts for just under 23% of revenue, grew 20.2% like-for-like to €65.6 million, a sharp recovery from the 12.9% it managed in the prior quarter.

The company attributed the rebound to strong customer acquisition among its smaller “Starters” accounts, particularly for virtual private server products, alongside expansion of its three-availability-zone regions in Paris and Milan.

It is the figure the rest of the quarter hangs on; without it, the headline number is unremarkable.

The other two segments did what they have been doing for a while. Private Cloud, still the largest business at 60% of revenue, rose 4.0% to €174.0 million, with growth among corporate customers offsetting churn from clients hit by Broadcom’s price increases on VMware.

Web Cloud, the legacy domain-names and hosting business, edged up 2.0% to €50.0 million. Existing customers kept spending, with the net revenue retention rate at 102% on a like-for-like basis.

Chairman and chief executive Octave Klaba said the group had “maintained strict financial discipline” and was reaffirming its target of positive levered free cash flow for the year.

OVHcloud confirmed all of its FY2026 objectives: organic revenue growth of between 5% and 7%, an adjusted EBITDA margin above the FY2025 level, and adjusted capital expenditure of 33% to 35% of revenue, excluding stock locked in for the following year under dedicated financing.

Much of the quarter’s news sat outside the numbers, in the slow-moving contest over what counts as a European cloud. T

he consortium of POST Luxembourg’s DEEP unit, OVHcloud, and Clever Cloud was one of four winners of the European Commission’s €180 million sovereign cloud contract for EU institutions, a framework that runs up to six years and that the Commission deliberately split four ways to avoid leaning on any single supplier.

OVHcloud is regularly described as France’s largest cloud company, one of the few genuine European alternatives to the hyperscalers, and it has separately been chosen as a subcontractor on the European Central Bank’s digital euro project.

Whether any of this amounts to sovereignty in more than the procurement sense is the question that keeps following European providers around.

OVHcloud runs on its own datacentres, 46 of them, but the wider stack still leans on chips designed and manufactured outside Europe, the gap that critics argue turns much of the continent’s sovereign-cloud ambition into managed dependence rather than independence.

The company spent the quarter trying to build out the part of the stack it can control. It entered exclusive negotiations to acquire Gladia, a voice-AI specialist, folding its speech-to-text technology into the OVHai unit, and previewed OVHai Workspace, an agentic AI platform bundling email, storage, and video conferencing with end-to-end encryption, at VivaTech in Paris.

It also reorganised its corporate sales force across six countries under a new chief revenue officer, Bruno Ronsse, a move pitched at the “trusted cloud” demand that the sovereignty debate has generated.

Growth was broad geographically. France, just under half of group revenue, rose 5.8% like-for-like; the rest of Europe grew 7.4%, more than double its first-half rate, on stronger public cloud momentum; and the rest of the world rose 8.6%.

OVHcloud serves 1.6 million customers across more than 140 countries, and crossed the billion-euro revenue mark for the first time in its last full year.

The group will report its full-year results on October 20.