Interview
Scaleway & SemiAnalysis: Unlocking AI's Potential Insights from Deploying Europe's Most Advanced
- Scaleway intends to deploy Project Ion, a consortium-built cluster equivalent to 280,000 H1N1 GPUs, as the largest in Europe, following its 2023 deployment of 1,000 Hopper GPUs, with operations expected to commence between the end of 2025 and early 2026.
- The company anticipates a market shift from initial large-scale training workloads toward post-training and inference applications as European AI adoption rates align with U.S. levels, driven by demand for large clusters similar to those emerging in the U.S. in early 2024.
- To prevent U.S. hyperscaler dominance and address latency, bandwidth constraints, and extraterritorial legal complexities, Scaleway aims to retain AI workflows within Europe by offering a complete ecosystem that processes data and runs AI on the same architecture.
- Scaleway expects the EU AI Gigafactory program to select five to six projects from 76 applicants and plans to secure one of these slots, positioning itself to serve a vast majority of EU customers including public research, government bodies, large corporations, and private labs.
- The provider plans to operate its public cloud at a pan-European level rather than by individual member states and intends to launch new regions and availability zones while accelerating its data roadmap following a recent acquisition.
- To provide alternatives to NVIDIA chips, Scaleway plans to support diverse CPU technologies including x86, ARM, RISC-V, and Apple silicones, while continuing to host major industry events such as the November AI Pulse conference.