By Leo Marchandon
April 9 (Reuters) – France’s OVHcloud is creating a dedicated defence unit after several European defence ministries approached it to support their military digital transformation, the datacentre operator said on Thursday.
Their needs include AI-augmented command, drone orchestration and communication interoperability across armed forces and within NATO systems alongside strict requirements on technological independence from non-European providers, OVH said in a half-year earnings statement.
OVH, Europe’s leading native cloud provider, has long positioned strategic autonomy as a differentiator against U.S. peers and has been pushing for a pan-European cloud and artificial intelligence strategy.
For the first half of its financial year, the company reported 5.5% organic revenue growth to 555 million euros ($648 million), driven by increased spending among its existing clients. It also confirmed the annual guidance for organic revenue growth of between 5% and 7%.
Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization grew 8.3% organically to 227 million euros in the six months through February.
OVH said it had front-loaded purchases of memory components and disks in the first half to secure supply and lock in prices ahead of further planned increases. This generated savings of around 10 million euros and partially offset exceptional cost inflation, which the company estimated at around 3 percentage points, it said.
It has also locked in 50 million euros worth of memory components for 2027, an investment that will be paid for by “dedicated exceptional financing” and counted as levered cash flow in this year’s accounting, it said.
($1 = 0.8570 euros)
(Reporting by Leo Marchandon in Gdansk, editing by Milla Nissi-Prussak)
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