The French government has allocated 20 million euros from its France 2030 plan to a group of companies including Cloud Temple, Thales, Bull, Vates, and the CEA. The goal is to create a French cloud computing and artificial intelligence service that can securely handle sensitive data by the end of 2028. The initiative was launched by Marina Ferrari, then State Secretary for Digital Affairs, on March 22, 2024, in Strasbourg. The call for projects was managed by Bpifrance, a public investment bank. According to the agreement, only cloud service providers could lead the candidate groups. Two and a half years later, Cloud Temple was selected as the leader of the project, which it announced on October 9. The partners will add 27 million euros of their own funds, making the total budget 47 million euros. Sébastien Lescop, general director of Cloud Temple, says the challenge now is to scale the effort. The five companies must develop services that can compete in a market dominated by American cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft. The project is based on the SecNumCloud regulations, which set security standards for cloud services handling sensitive data. French companies have been working hard to meet these standards, with OVHcloud recently obtaining the qualification for its public cloud. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu made it mandatory for private providers handling sensitive government data to meet these standards, referencing the ANSSI (National Cybersecurity Agency of France) requirements. Cloud Temple already holds this qualification for its infrastructure and platform offerings. The group plans to develop cloud and AI services that comply with NIS 2 (a European cybersecurity directive) and the AI Act, a proposed European regulation on artificial intelligence. Thales will contribute its cybersecurity expertise and its trusted cloud subsidiary, S3NS. Google Cloud owns a minority stake in S3NS, and SAP acquired it in April to run its enterprise resource planning systems under French jurisdiction. In terms of hardware, Bull will integrate AI-specific infrastructures using its in-house software platform. The CEA, a French research organization, will work on next-generation computing architectures. Vates, based in Grenoble, will provide the open-source virtualization base. The company develops the XCP-ng platform and raised 30 million euros from IRIS and Bpifrance on October 6, just three days before the consortium was announced. While some French suppliers support the consortium model, others are skeptical. Before an inquiry commission on digital dependencies in April, Sébastien Lescop noted that European cloud providers had dropped from 27 percent of the market share in 2017 to 15 percent. Philippe Latombe, president of the commission, questioned the consortium approach, noting that European companies had often bid as groups for a major European Union tender. Damien Lucas, general director of Scaleway, said his company does not believe in the consortium model, arguing that customers seek a credible alternative to American services like AWS or Azure, not a fragmented group of companies. Philippe Miltin, general director of Outscale, suggested the government should focus its support on a few leading companies instead of spreading it out. In the France 2030-supported consortium, Cloud Temple leads the program and carries out most of the work. However, Damien Lucas praised the call for projects that led to this consortium’s selection. He believes such funding allows companies to continue developing new products. Most investments in the sector are focused on infrastructure, and Lucas is waiting for public buyers to commit to orders that can finance these efforts.