Layer 2.5 · head to head
OVHcloud vs Scaleway
European sovereignty from a public host against a telecoms-backed one.
| OVHcloud | Scaleway | |
|---|---|---|
| Can you leave | Portable. The workload is standard enough to move to another vendor without a rewrite. | Movable with effort. Expect to redo images, storage wiring and networking. |
| Counterparty | Public European company with two decades of hosting behind it. Low. | Backed by a large European telecoms group — materially different from a venture-funded pure-play. |
| What it is | Purpose-built GPU cloud. Owns or leases its own datacentre capacity and sells it directly. | Purpose-built GPU cloud. Owns or leases its own datacentre capacity and sells it directly. |
| How you reach it | You get the physical machine. Maximum control, and every layer above it is yours to run. | You get virtual machines. The familiar cloud model. |
| Accelerators | H100, A100, L40S, L4 | H100, L40S, L4, plus Ascend and other non-NVIDIA options |
| Regions | EU, Canada, US | France, Netherlands, Poland |
| Pricing model | Hourly and monthly, published, with famously low egress. | Hourly, published, EU-billed. |
| Getting started | Credit card. | Credit card. |
| Capacity | Moderate. | Moderate. |
| Ownership | Public (Euronext). | Iliad Group (public parent). |
OVHcloud
For: European bare-metal buyers who care about egress costs and data residency.
The catch: Support experience is the recurring complaint, not the hardware.
Economics: Low egress is the structural advantage. For workloads that move data, that line beats the GPU line.
Scaleway
For: EU-sovereignty requirements where the supplier being European is the actual requirement.
The catch: Smaller GPU catalogue than the specialists, and the console assumes you are a general cloud customer.
Economics: Priced to compete in Europe. Sovereignty is the product; the GPU rate is secondary.
Neither table row is a price
Deliberately. Published on-demand rates at this layer move weekly, and essentially nobody signing a real contract pays them — every serious buyer pays less than every list figure either of these companies publishes. Quoting one here would date this page within a month.
The GPU cost calculator carries dated, sourced figures instead, and the durable finding there is the spread: the identical H100 rents from $1.99 to $11.06 an hour on published on-demand prices, depending only on who you rent it from.
The layers underneath both
Whichever you pick is renting you chips in a building that needs power. In 2026 that is the constraint that binds: Microsoft has disclosed an Azure backlog it cannot fill for want of megawatts rather than accelerators, and the US interconnection queue exceeds 2,600 GW with roughly 80% of projects withdrawing before they energise.
Layer 2 — Silicon · Layer 1 — Energy · The interconnection queue